Details that make me question reality: You can view events live on the East Coast (well, Eastern time) but not on the West Coast. Live is not live anymore. 75% of NBC’s coverage is live (on the East Coast), but an army of commentators sit and broadcast from New York, not Beijing. These people sit in a cubicle at 30 Rock and comment on feeds. Do they lose something without the smell of sweat and chlorine? Here is not there anymore. Actually most people are watching online these days. Including myself – what I like about the CBC is the straight feed without commentary. Of course, the window could be bigger. I don’t know what ‘TV’ is anymore. And – (back to the future) I don’t really know if it’s live or not. Let’s say the CBC says an event starts at 7am – whose 7am is that? There’s an 11 hour time difference between Halifax and Beijing and a lot of potential time zones. Toronto’s, I guess. Who is watching? I dunno. Me? One bartender told me there’s no way he’d be viewing in the middle of the night. Another factual glitch breaking down the Olympic reality database: The Wall Street Journal’s Number’s Guy says it’s hardly likely one billion people watched the China-USA basketball game. Neilsen doesn’t go global – yet. The number is more like 100 million. But if no one knows, how can the numbers guy give another ‘more realistic’ number? Next thing you know, we’ll be hearing that Canada already won gold!
This article appears in Aug 7-13, 2008.
I’d watch online if CBC could get its shit together…I can’t watch boxing!