Fansided

Time is a flat circle at the 2018 Winter Olympics

By Shea Corrigan

PYEONGCHANG-GUN, SOUTH KOREA - FEBRUARY 12: Marc-Antoine Gagnon of Canada competes in the Freestyle Skiing Men's Moguls Final on day three of the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympic Games at Phoenix Snow Park on February 12, 2018 in Pyeongchang-gun, South Korea. (Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)
PYEONGCHANG-GUN, SOUTH KOREA - FEBRUARY 12: Marc-Antoine Gagnon of Canada competes in the Freestyle Skiing Men's Moguls Final on day three of the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympic Games at Phoenix Snow Park on February 12, 2018 in Pyeongchang-gun, South Korea. (Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images) /
facebooktwitterreddit

Embrace the fact you can no longer know what “watch live” means.

A man once said, “Time is a flat circle. Everything we have done or will do we will do over and over and over again — forever.” Was he talking about the NBC broadcast of the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics? He wasn’t not talking about the NBC broadcast of Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics.

As we all know by now, Pyeongchang, South Korea is 14 hours ahead of New York, 15 hours ahead of Chicago and 17 hours ahead of Los Angeles. Events that take place in the evening are “live” in the early hours Eastern time. Competitions that take place in the morning take place the previous evening in the United States. This, in and of itself, is not a problem. Time zones have existed since approximately 1883 and given the Olympics is a global competition, several countries are going to be screwed by the time difference each time the games come around. But only one country gets screwed by NBC.

See, NBC has embraced the loosest possible definition of “live” when it comes to its Olympic broadcasts. It declared early on that it would air the games live, eschewing tape delay. However, in practice, that meant that they would make coverage available in real time (i.e. online), while still using tape delay for the TV schedule. Look at the TV listing schedule and notice how rarely it says “Live” next to the programming.

Using the NBC app, which is otherwise a surprisingly easy-to-use portal for watching the games, is arguably even more confusing. “Watch live” can refer either to what is currently airing on TV (which is, nine out of 10 times, not live) or live streams from Pyeongchang (which are indeed live).

(A quick sidebar to acknowledge, too, that if you care about who provides commentary, that means different streams too. E.g. Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir call figure skating on the NBC Primetime stream, not the Figure skating stream.)

Similarly, there is no way to gauge what social media will treat as live. For example, the women’s 500 m short track qualifiers, in which Maame Biney skated, took place in the early morning on Saturday, Feb. 9. Yet the “watch Maame Biney’s Olympic debut LIVE” tweets from NBC went out in Saturday evening, aligned with when the network aired the qualifiers on TV.

Next: Which James Bond would win gold in the biathlon?

If you care about spoilers and also prefer to live your life by the TV schedule, you’re in for a treacherous path. If you’re all about streaming and also your sleep, ditto. If you’re committed to watching in real-time and love social media, prepare for deja vu. Ultimately, though, the Winter Olympics just aren’t worth overthinking.

Let the Winter Olympics happen on whatever timeline is true to you. Define “live” for yourself. Everything the Olympians have done or will do they will do over and over and over again — forever.

Home/Winter Olympics