NBC's Tape Delay Is Ruining the Olympics

Furious about the archaic tape delay policy at NBC? Henry Blodget feels your pain. When the Business Insider blogger sat down to watch the Men’s Downhill live at 2:15pm yesterday and discovered that NBC was holding it for prime time, he became enraged. “NBC isn’t the network that brings us the Olympics,” he wrote. “It’s the network that prevents us from watching the Olympics.”

Why not show the events live on a subsidiary network, then again in prime time? How much would NBC really lose? Ebersol explained the policy in 2008, saying that viewers “want to see the Olympics when they're available…and that’s in prime time.” But that was a pre-Twitter age. These days, can you really expect us to avoid all media for eight hours? “Does Dick Ebersol watch the Olympics on 8-hour tape-delayed highlight reels? We, personally, hate you for this." (More 2010 Vancouver Olympics stories.)