When I watched the Olympics as a kid, I dreamed of being able to see every event I wanted, when I wanted. I learned to use my parents’ VCR just so I could tape the 1992 Winter Games and watch them over and over again. In the 1990s, that was the closest I could get to having the Olympics on demand.
Well, 10 year old me, guess what? We have Olympics on demand now, and it is spectacular.
For the last week, I’ve been taking advantage of all of the on-demand and replay options that these Olympics have had to offer. Between returning to my full-time job and having a 10 week old, I don’t get to see much live or even during NBC’s prime-time coverage. Comcast, my cable provider, boasts of offering 6,800 hours of coverage on the docket from Rio, and I’ve been playing catch-up and making the most of my limited Olympic-watching moments with a few of their key features.
Comcast’s Marc Goodman reached out to me before the games and pointed out a few of the features that I’ve been making the most of. On Saturday, I finally got to check out the Gold Zone, a NFL Red Zone-style option. You get to watch four sports at one time. It’s Olympic multitasking. It’s not just focused on U.S. teams and athletes, which means you get a good mix of all of the obscure events any Olympics have to offer.
Also, it took me until Day 10 of the Games, but I finally found the hidden secret of the Olympics: the live track and field call room feed. I speak “Olympics” into the remote, and I get a list of every Olympic event currently on live on a network. Then I scroll down one level of the menu, and I can watch any event that’s streaming on NBCOlympics.com, including the track and field call room feed. It’s people walking on a small strip of track and getting psyched up for their races. It’s silent, but strangely captivating. It’s Olympic watching meditation.
And in what could possibly be the most important Comcast Olympics feature: all the Olympics and Olympic Trials coverage is available on demand until October 1st. That still may not be long enough to get through everything I want to watch, but I’ll be able to come close. The only bummer: I wish the men’s gymnastics Olympic Trials replays were the entire broadcast, instead of individual routines of just guys who made the team. If the USOC can’t allow the Trials to be livestreamed on YouTube like most USA Gymnastics events, I would love to see them give a similar level of coverage on the platforms they do have agreements with. But it is still better than what we used to have when I was a kid.
Though NBC has lagged in some of its coverage (especially in gymnastics,) being able to watch on demand both on the computer and TV has been a game-changer for me. For an Olympics-junkie like myself, it has been super helpful.