Wednesday, August 8, 2012

NBC Fails At Olympic Video

I'm tired of complaining about video failures but this one is really bad. NBC decided they would stream everything at the Olympics but clearly didn't upgrade their servers to handle the traffic.

Last week, I had no problems watching sports little seen on TV. White Water canoeing/kayaking, weightlifting, fencing. This week however has been awful. I spent two days trying to watch the evening finals in track & field for yesterday. That shouldn't happen.

What was going on? Not just buffering, but a complete failure where the screen would completely freeze up, causing me to open the task manager so I could close the browser. I use Firefox exclusively, but just as an experiment I used IE. It was better but it froze at least once also.

Did NBC not realize how many people would be using the streams? One report says that 5 different events had over 1 million views. That's why there were issues. Go on Google & type in NBC Olympic problems & see how many pages of results come up. This was incompetence clearly. I want to be able to check out sports not seen on my TV, but spending 4-5 hours to watch 2 hours of video won't cut it.

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