Now that the games are over, it's time to take a few minutes and reflect back on two weeks of great memories.
I am lucky enough to be working from home, which meant that I was able to keep a good handle on what was going on each day. There were a number of things I found interesting about the 2010 Olympic Games coverage.
You can't watch TV for more than an hour. TV is no longer designed for long periods of viewing. I have the (mis)fortune of being able to work from home. This means that I can keep the TV on in the background as I work. During the Olympics, I was able to keep my TV tuned to CTV for the majority of the day. I guess the point I am trying to make here is that I was exposed to HOURS and HOURS of Olympic TV.
The problem is that TV is no longer made to watched like this. I kept seeing the same pieces over and over. A story about Difference Makers (hosted by Rick Hansen) was shown about two hours. Events I had watched live were replayed over and over. It is understandable given the state of media that this is the case but I have to say that the quality of the production itself is far below the quality of the game themselves.
For more thoughts on the games, check out Molly Woods' take over at her CNET column.
The TV ads were ridiculous and annoying. It seems that three or four different companies paid for all of the TV advertising because I kept seeing the same ads over and over. Canadian Tire, Tim Horton's, Quebec, British Columbia... that I simply became annoyed with the ads, just like I did with the "I Believe" song. It seems that frequency = relevancy = resonance in the minds of the TV stations.
Exhibit A: The Tourism BC ad. How can you advertise "you gotta be here" when the people in ad are clearly not actually in the locations they are shown in??
Exhibit B: The Quebec Tourism ad. Great imagery but it is the cheap song that is a rip-off of the Price Is Right song that really got to me after day 2 of the games.
More to come as I can find them on Youtube.
Some ads were amazing. This CTV ad with Michael J. Fox was AMAZING. Timely, relevant and very emotional.
1 comment:
Hey Danny!
Great post; I enjoyed it because you focused on one particular aspect of the experience - TV!
C hooked up some contraption to receive HD signal at home, so we were able to watch CTV 24/7 (but as you point out that's not exactly a treat!). The first week of the Games, the most apparent thing was how much I missed the CBC coverage on the Games. UGGGH the CTV team did not have the experience in cutting and producing; their ongoing "I Believe" grated on everyone's nerves...
By the second week I think they picked up some steam and figured out a thing or two about editing, producing more interesting features (maybe they took a page from NBC).
You've probably read enough about how the city came alive those 17 days. I can't explain it and I wish you could have seen it Danny. It was magical. I read somewhere that when Crosby scored his gold medal goal, even the DTES Tent City cheered. And I'll admit this - during the third period intermission, when things were grim at best... the 10 people in our apartment broke out in "I Believe". Now like Pavlov's dog when I hear that dang song I get the chills.
Take 'er easy!
b
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