To retain my Australian citizenship, I am legally obligated to fulfill a yearly sports-watching quota. This year, I hope to achieve my target by watching the Olympics.
So, was anyone here last time around who can give me an idea what the coverage will be like? I read this morning the local stations will be broadcasting them, but I assume they will have their own local (Chinese) commentators and English won’t be available. Will the cable channels carry them, and if so, with which country’s commentators? Watching them in Hong Kong was terrible - the cable companies had no coverage and the local (expat) coverage was terrible - the same people calling every sport, whether they had any knowledge of it or not (“and that looks like a backflip… and she’s slipped a little there… yes, nice landing”).
As an aside, I was thrilled to hear that the new digital signals “will also enable drivers to watch the Games in their cars”. Of course, such drivers would only do so while their car was completely stationary and with the parking brake engaged. Right? Right???
Not sure what will be happening but you will probably find that the coverage is about the same as that in Honkers. It might even be the same commentators on Star Sports.
If I were you, I’d keep my hopes low.
It’s tough being an expat Aussie sometimes. Trying to find enough sport to watch to maintain the citizenship, I mean.
Look for a bar that has Multichoice Africa… the South African package… off the same satellite there is a free channel called DD Sports which has live coverage of the Olympics… I just saw Holland beat South Africa 6-2 in womens field hockey and now there are some swimming finals on…
And on another channel called Dubai Sports they have womens volleyball on live now as well… Cuba and Germany… but it’s in Arabic…
The Olympic coverage on cable TV is so pathetic. I have only managed to catch a little weightlifting, baseball and table tennis. It seems they are only showing sports where Chinese Taipei is competing, and even that is so heavily interspersed with ads that you miss half of it :fume:
It makes me want to go back to Beijing. I was there for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 - There was much more TV coverage over there.
With China top of the medals table and licking their lips in anticipation of 2008, you can bet there’s almost nothing else in the media there except Olympics, Olympics and Olympics. What better could the controllers ask for to whip up that nationalistic fervour that they set so much store by?
I saw Olympic coverage on no less than 5 channels the other night.
Star Sports
MinShi
ZhongShi
TaiShi
HuaShi
Hey Daasgrrl, Do you still have Dream SatTV? I saw it on CNNfN this morning on Dream, I will check again tonight when it is live.
On four different network channels I could see the following: Women’s weight lifting, synchronized diving, softball and fencing. Star Sports had the talking heads on there too often.
Here in the UK, BBC1 has 3 live feeds to choose from. Must be dozens more if you include the sporting channels on satelite or cable. But then again the UK has bothered to send competitors for more than 2 events.
And our medal prospects are hardly much better than Taiwan’s, judging from the dismal tally of just one silver and one bronze landed so far.
On a side note: I was pleased to see that the BBC Sport website is referring to Taiwan as “Taiwan” rather than “Chinese Taipei” in the listing of the baseball results. I expect that will be changed once the protests start rolling in from you-know-where.
I do indeedy! 24-hour Olympics on Channel V and eTV, as well as good coverage on NBN during the day. If they could only pipe in Roy and HG I could ask for nothing more
Got to see Thorpie and Hackett swim, Carrigan take the road race, and some excellent gymnastics and diving as well as a lot of other stuff. Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!
The Philippines - or at least NBN - almost missed out as well. Too lazy to find the link, but I believe the government had to bail the previous TV station out from its (unpaid) debt to the IOC for the Sydney 2000 Olympics so that they could have them this time around.
At last they showed some track and field - well, field, no track - a bit of pole vault and triple jump. I haven’t seen a single race on Taiwan TV so far.
Watched a bit of soccer - Italy vs. Mali - pretty good.
One of the benefits of satellite tv is that I have 5 English Olympics channels showing different live events as well as two 24 hour olympics channels that show live events and has replays of the days events.
For 20K and no card fees you could have had it all… 24 hour Euro 2004, Live Olypmics, as well as other good English programming, plus future world cups live.
