So far, even the Olympics can’t budge our outdated TV models

Frustration with a lack of access, editing and the overall confusion about who can see what of the Olympics shows how frustrated consumers are about our outdated TV, but NBC has paid $1.18 billion to broadcast the games. Who is the consumer here?

Once again, NBC is irritating the heck out of millions of Americans by messing around with the Olympics. Once again, the decision to show the opening ceremony in prime time via a time delay has resulted in people accusing NBC of “not getting it,” and of thinking “it’s 1992.” Once again, the decision to edit the games has some sports fans irked about cuts NBC made in the opening ceremony.

And once again, U.S. consumers don’t get it. Sure, people are frustrated because they can’t easily stream the Olympics online without a cable subscription, and there will always be sports fans who don’t want the edited version of The Games with the life stories on athletes and dramatic cuts. But frankly, for now, NBC doesn’t really care what those people want.

How dare @NBCOlympics cut the 7/7 tribute from the #Olympics opening ceremony. Disgraceful. ow.ly/czaOk—
Jamie Klenetsky (@jamieklenetsky) July 28, 2012

NBC paid $1.18 billion for the right to broadcast the Olympics and it will be a cold day in hell before it dilutes the amount it can charge advertisers or the value it has to cable providers. In many ways, even though NBC depends on huge audiences to justify the rates it’s charging advertisers, it can afford to alienate some of them. And it’s worth noting that there are probably millions of happy families who watched the opening ceremony last night and had little idea it could be any other way.

In the U.S., people who want to stream are a highly vocal minority, but it’s a minority that is growing. And while NBC may not care that I — as one of the between 3.6 or 9 million cord cutters — couldn’t authenticate to see the opening ceremony via the web or streaming, maybe someone should.

NBC broadcast an edited and time-delayed version of the opening ceremony last night over the air, but I couldn’t see that either. I can’t get over-the-air TV since the switch from analog to digital TV signals in 2009, because my home just doesn’t seem to be in the right location. Even satellites don’t work. The only way I could watch NBC’s broadcast of the ceremony was if I paid for cable, but that’s not something I want to do just to watch a once-every-two-year event. And anyway, I shouldn’t have to buy cable to see the opening ceremony, since NBC is using the public airwaves for free to deliver broadcast TV. Glenn Fleishman via Twitter suggested that the FCC ought to investigate this, and maybe it should.

I believe FCC should look into NBC, which broadcasts over air, restricting Olympics video online to cable subscribers. Fundamentally wrong—
Glenn Fleishman (@GlennF) July 28, 2012

But really what I think needs to occur is a realization that until the business models right themselves in the TV industry, consumers, especially cord cutters, are going to get screwed out of some content. It’s not “fair,” but as the population of people who demand streaming grows, and they in turn are seen a valuable demographic to advertisers, then perhaps the next Summer Games will give consumers more of what they want, where and when they want it.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock user Padmayogini
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U.S. women win silver medal in synchronized diving at London Olympics

Americans Abby Johnston and Kelci Bryant pose with their silver medal after finishing second in synchronized diving on Sunday. (Lars Baron / Getty Images / July 29, 2012)

LONDON -- After Kelci Bryant and Abby Johnston folded every article of clothing in their rooms, the synchronized diving tandem headed to the bus Sunday morning. En route, Johnston turned to Bryant with a muted reminder: Don't forget to bring the podium outfit. You know… just in case.

And after breakfast and some episodes of"Burn Notice"and "Pretty Little Liars," bobbing along to the music in her headphones, contemplating a meet that would be her last, Bryant was in a happy place and offered her own reminder to Johnston: No matter what, we've done amazing things. I love you.

"We had this weird moment," Bryant said. "It was super corny. SUPER corny."

"It was," Johnston said. "Afterwards we were both like, that was corny, put our headphones on and just walked away."

They had one more thing to do, as it happens. They ended the United States' profound Olympic diving medal drought, with Bryant teaming with Johnston for silver in three-meter synchronized diving, the first American hardware in diving since 2000 and the first American synchronized diving medal in history.

It wasn't close to the dominant Chinese tandem of He Zi and Wu Minxia, who won gold with a score of 346.20, a healthy 24.30 points ahead of Bryant and Johnston. But finally standing on the podium allowed the U.S. diving squad to get its head above water, so to speak, as Bryant and Johnston plunged under it.

"It's definitely been spoken about," Bryant said of the dearth of diving medals. "Everyone has said something about wanting to get those medals that we haven't been able to get. ... It's a goal for any country to walk away with as many medals as they can get. I think that this is a great start for USA Diving."

Bryant and Johnston first dived as a team in 2010 at a meet in Mexico City, picking up a bronze medal after practicing together for all of one week.

"We were both kind of like, huh, yeah, we're pretty good together," Johnson said.

Since September, they have dived with no one else. Their international results in 2012 included one fourth-place, two third-place and one second-place finish. Still, there was an element of surprise to Sunday's results.

"We definitely expected a lot out of ourselves, and obviously we wanted a medal, but we also knew we could only control ourselves," Bryant said. "Our goal was to hit every one of our dives to the best that we could do. We did that. The medal is definitely a good bonus."

Bryant only folded her garments after Johnston did it first as part of her personal ritual, but now she'd return to her room Sunday bearing a shiny new accessory to go with fastidiously creased clothing. She went out with a silver medal. A tidy ending all around.

bchamilton@tribune.com

twitter @ChiTribHamilton

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Review: NBC's stumble can't mask Olympics' beautiful opening ceremony

Fireworks cover the Olympic Stadium during Opening Ceremonies. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times / July 29, 2012)

Through a fortuitous series of events, because someone knew someone who knew someone, I watched Friday's remarkable opening ceremony of the London Olympic Games by way of the BBC — which is to say, without commercials or Ryan Seacrest and with relatively little intrusion from the commentators. Later, I saw what the United States saw.

Fellow Americans, you have my sympathy.

Titled "Isles of Wonder" and conceived by Danny Boyle, the director of"Slumdog Millionaire," it was by turns moving, bizarre, funny and exciting and often surprisingly dark. It included the queen, in a James Bond parody, seeming to parachute into the Olympic stadium ("I hope it made people laugh," she was heard to say the next day), a troop of Mary Poppinses vanquishing Lord Voldemort, a pastoral village destroyed by the dark satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution, and a musical trip through time culminating in the invention of the World Wide Web.

It had at times a quality of seeming completely random even as one suspected that repeated viewings would reveal all sorts of connections and echoes and interior rhymes. If there were a through-line to be untangled from its $42-million, cast-of-thousands, higgledy-piggledy progress through modern Britain, it might be something like, "Sorry for the unintended consequences, but we did give you steam engines, great pop music and comedy and the roots of social networking. It was ugly there for a while, but we're all right — and everybody dance now."

PHOTOS: London Olympics opening ceremony

On the BBC, this ran as a seamless four-hour stream. On American television, it ran half an hour longer to accommodate commercials, with additional time carved out of the show itself, destroying its pace and shape. Controversially, NBC cut an entire sequence, Akram Khan's dance on the theme of mortality, which served as a meditative transition between Boyle's main show and the parade of athletes, in favor of Seacrest's perfectly unenlightening interview with swimmer Michael Phelps.

The commentary was by Bob Costas, NBC's veteran voice of the Olympics; "Today" host Matt Lauer; and his former co-host Meredith Vieira. They are all in the talking business — silence (that is, the absence of talk) is as good as dead air — and in the absence of anyone else to interview, they will inquire unto themselves: When Lauer said, during a tribute to the National Health Service, "I am sitting here watching this, I'm thinking what an incredible experience for these doctors and nurses. They're looking around them in this Olympic stadium thinking, 'My goodness, I'm part of something incredibly special,'" he was only telling you about Matt Lauer, sitting and thinking and claiming to know what other people were feeling.

That is worse than saying nothing at all.

GRAPHIC: Your Olympics TV-watching guide

In defending its decision not to live-stream Friday's proceedings — an economic decision (making people watch ads) it attempted to cast as an aesthetic one (advancing television as the "medium that best demonstrates their grandeur and majesty") — NBC sought to delineate a difference between the Games, which it is streaming whole, and the framing ceremonies, which it termed "entertainment spectacles."

I see less of a difference. Because although unquestionably a sporting event, the Olympic Games are also a kind of theater, an unscripted performance on the theme of athletics as much as an athletic contest in fact.

They draw viewers who otherwise might spend no time thinking about such things and weave them in with narratives of individual excellence, hardship overcome and global unity (within a framework of global competition) that are difficult to resist. This quality has been amplified in recent years by the ceremonies that celebrate them; these can waver between magic and kitsch, between austere beauty and manipulative sentiment, but there is nothing on Earth to match them in scale or reach.

And as theater, these ceremonies are also a kind of sport, with each successive host nation striving to outdo the last. For many years, the parade of competing athletes was the spectacle; thematically, it's still the heart of the show, a many-colored cavalcade of gorgeous humanity that stays unchanging within the Games' changing contexts. Now, without losing its inspirational glow, it has became a kind of breather between the high-tech wonders of the first act and the final uplift of the oath-taking, flag-raising, torch-lighting finale.

Saturday's broadcast, in which the Games officially began, was the familiar mix of crafted drama, emphasizing rivalries and obstacles; athletes being asked "How do you feel?" before and after wins or losses; and commentary that ran from the unhelpful to aphoristic to the technically enlightening. Costas' summaries sound smart; new kid Seacrest, here I guess for youth appeal, filed a filmed interview with Phelps, his mother and sisters that was cute, for better or worse, but it's still too soon to judge his usefulness here.

But it is all beautiful and thrilling to behold, and whenever the professional talkers begin to pall, it proves just as beautiful and thrilling with the sound down.

ALSO:

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 robert.lloyd@latimes.com

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U.S. sweeps past Serbia in men's volleyball at London Olympics

American Donald Suxho lunges for a dig against Serbia on Sunday. (Jeff Roberson / Associated Press / July 29, 2012)

LONDON -- Busy with training responsibilities for his Korean club team, Matthew Anderson didn't watch any of the U.S. men's volleyball matches from their galvanizing run to gold at the Beijing Olympics.

But last year, after a disappointing sixth-place finish at the FIVB World Cup, somebody popped in a DVD of the gold-medal match.

"It was pretty cool," Anderson said.

Expectations for a repeat are low, but the U.S. opened its defense in impressive fashion Sunday at Earls Court. Thanks in large part to Anderson's relentless attacking, the U.S. swept defending European champion Serbia, 25-17, 25-22, 25-11, in 90 minutes.

Anderson joked he was nervous he'd be nervous, but his 16 spikes and two kills suggested otherwise.

"I thought Matt played very similar to how he has played the last two years; and that is, you wouldn't really notice it was an Olympic debut," Coach Alan Knipe said. "And that's maybe his best quality besides his skill set. There aren't a lot of peaks and valleys to his demeanor."

It's an approach abetted from listening to old standbys Reid Priddy, Clayton Stanley and Richard Lambourne, three of the five veterans from the 2008 squad.

"In training, things will happen and they'll say, 'Remember this. It's going to happen in a big-time match,' " Anderson said. "And you have to be able to come back from that."

The U.S. displayed impressive resiliency in the second set after Donald Suxho put his fingerprints all over a dominant first set. Trailing early, the U.S. didn't lead until 20-19 on a point featuring Priddy and Russell Holmes combining for a block that appeared to land out of bounds.

Priddy and Holmes followed with clean block kills and when Bojan Janic committed Serbia's fifth service error on set point, a test had been passed.

"We were able to chip away and not show a lot of panic," Knipe said. "I'm proud of the guys for that."

Priddy was everywhere, diving for a dig here, acing a third-set serve there.

"Reid was the driving force to us staying focused on the little things," Knipe said.

The U.S. hopes little things can turn to big things, and Germany is next on Tuesday in a stacked pool that also features top-ranked Brazil. The Germans beat the U.S. in a taut five-set match at the World League finals in May.

Anderson, as is his nature, is undaunted.

"I think we have a chance to win the gold," Anderson said. "We're a good team. It just takes one match and you can move on. Hopefully, we can do that."

In other matches Sunday, Bulgaria swept Britain, Argentina swept Australia, Russia swept Germany, Italy beat Poland, 3-1, and gold-medal favorite Brazil swept Tunisia.

kcjohnson@tribune.com

twitter.com/kcjhoop

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