UPDATE: The special soccer and hoops Olympics channels are on 1443 and 1444 on Time Warner.
Bob Costas prides himself on steering clear of the hyperbole that afflicts most sports announcers. But NBC's primetime studio host for the Summer Olympics can't help himself when asked about the opening ceremonies that will air on Friday night from Beijing, China.
"It will be off-the-charts spectacular," Costas predicted.
He is not alone in that assessment. Observers who have glimpsed video of the rehearsal -- sneaked out by a South Korean TV crew -- describe in awestruck terms an estimated 10,000 or more performers executing a demanding and dazzling 50-minute program of dance, martial arts, laser-controlled lights and music by world-renowned Chinese pianist Lang Lang.
The ceremony, which begins 6:30 p.m. CT Friday on NBC, is just the start of an unprecedented 17-day video feast for the eyes, as record numbers of Americans with flat-screen TVs take in the first Olympics to be completely telecast in brilliant high-definition video and streamed live over the Internet.
Of the estimated 3,400 hours of combined TV and online coverage of the Beijing Games, more than 80 percent will be viewable live in the Central and Eastern time zones, either on the NBC network, one of several NBC-owned cable channels or NBCOlympics.com. That Web site will also be the home to thousands of hours of on-demand replays from events that have already aired on TV.
During the 2004 Games in Athens, NBC offered a select few events in high-definition on a one-day delay.
"In just four years' time, to be able to go to the point where all 34 Olympic sports from all 37 Olympic venues throughout China will be 100 percent in HD, it's really a remarkable evolution of the technology," said David Neal, executive producer of NBC Sports.
Another innovation that's come along since 2004 is robust video compression, first popularized by the Web site YouTube. Using a new version of the Microsoft web viewer Silverlight, NBC is offering full-screen, super-sharp video of all of the Beijing events. Replays will also be available to customers with video-enabled AT&T and Verizon wireless phones.
And NBC has beefed up its already considerable menu of cable TV offerings, adding two free channels to Time Warner and Comcast customers in Kansas City, one focusing on Olympic soccer and the other on Olympic basketball. That's in addition to the sports televised on four basic cable channels NBC owns -- USA, CNBC, MSNBC and Oxygen -- as well as the Universal HD and Spanish-language Telemundo channels.
Still, the telecasts that will draw the largest audiences will be the prime-time programs on the NBC network, and that is where the drama of China's first Olympic games will be played out, as a team of NBC sportscasters and journalists attempt to distill each day's events into a handful of easily digestible storylines and characters.
The Olympics are always a big show on a gaudy stage, but in its highly charged convergence of visual spectacle and international drama, the Beijing Games may be rivaled only by the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, which were held during the peak of the Cold War. And just as Soviet athletes first announced themselves to American TV audiences then, China expects the billion-dollar investment it has made in its Olympic athletes to make a similar impression on viewers now.
"China thinks that this 21st century is its century, and they're going to dominate it, and this is their introducing China to the world," says David Maraniss, author of Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World.
One of the storylines viewers can expect to hear and read about often is the story of China great leap forward, from Maoism to capitalism in the course of one generation. It has created a middle class estimated at between 300 million and 600 million, whose demands for oil, food and raw materials rival our own.
"This is China's chance to publicly expose a brand new country that is different than it used to be," said Bob Woodruff, the ABC newsman who will host a one-hour special, "China Inside Out," at 9 tonight on KMBC-9.
Thousands of journalists have streamed into China to cover not just the Olympics but this story of transformation. Media observers wonder, though, if the Chinese government will also permit journalists to tell the less flattering aspects of life there today.
Amnesty International and the Huffington Post have reported that their Web sites are inaccessible from Beijing. Chinese police have tried to stop news crews from covering protests by supporters of Falun Gong (photo taken from this website), Tibet and Taiwan independence. Reuters reported Tuesday that a government order issued last week, after an outcry from foreign press organizations, instructs police not to interfere except in cases of "drastic action that attracts a crowd or affects public order."
NBC has sent its top news anchors, Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw, as well as former Baghdad correspondent Richard Engel and other reporters to Beijing to provide reporting separate from the coverage of the sports department. Jim Cantore of the Weather Channel, which NBC is in the process of buying, will even be on hand to cover Beijing's climate conditions.
UPDATE 8-6-2008: The President's going to give China a human-rights scolding.
Since last October, NBC's Mark Mullen has filed regular reports for "NBC Nightly News" on the complexities of China's economic boom. For instance, Mullen reported last fall, "There's now a growing divide between urban city dwellers and the other 70 percent of Chinese -- mostly poor from the countryside."
The network's top Olympics executive, Dick Ebersol, said he has had "constant dialogue" over the past seven years with Chinese officials, and in that time he has seen their attitudes toward outside media change. They understand that media coverage is a double-edged sword. If the Beijing Games are to boost China's image around the globe, they must first relinquish their control over the most basic of freedoms: the flow of information.
Speaking to a group of reporters in July, Ebersol recounted an encounter with a senior official with Chinese television last August, just after the "Today" show had broadcast from Tiananmen Square to mark the one-year countdown to the Olympics. The live feed had been relayed by satellite from NBC's truck in Beijing to its studios in New York, and from there to the world.
"I walked over to him," said Ebersol, "and I said, 'Sir, you have such a pensive look on your face.' He said, 'Yes, because this is the beginning of change for us. This satellite transmission is yours. It's going directly to the satellite.'"
China's government is a corrupt and evil bunch of vicious thugs. I hope somebody manages to break through all the propaganda and send a message to the world embarrassing the brutal Chinese government during the Olympics. Bush's speech in Thailand was one of the few good things he's ever done.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/04/AR2008080401942.html
Posted by: Ike | August 07, 2008 at 11:43 AM