NBC Winter Olympics Information Displays
Watching the winter Olympics this year, I took note of the great use of information overlays by NBC. Overall I have been impressed with their sparing use of graphics to convey the critical information. I hope that this simple elegant design will be the standard rather than the exception in television and web videos that are pushing the limits on pop-ups and unnecessarily heavy overlays. Below is a great example of the biathlon’s simple hit/miss shot penalty information displays:
Single competitor shooting with infograhic (from nbc.com)
Two competitors shooting with picture in picture (from nbc.com)
On the actual broadcast, these small information units of hit/miss were stacked up beside appropriate flags to show multiple competitors at once. Although hard to follow the progression, it was a great way to show a lot of information in very little space and in real-time.
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I’m sorry, but I believe that all NBC has done is show the feed from CTV, a Canadian television company, who is actually broadcasting the Olympics.
I agree with the visualization of information, but the credit should go to CTV, not NBC, I believe.
Hey Srdjan,
Thanks for the comment. I haven’t been able to confirm that it is actually CTV’s coverage or no. I know that both channels were given exclusive rights. Can you point me to the credits for this.
That said, there is a lot of hate out there for the NBC coverage due to the limitation in when things are broadcast. Check out: http://newteevee.com/2010/01/14/nbc-skimps-on-online-olympics-coverage-again/, http://techcrunch.com/2008/08/25/no-matter-how-nbc-spins-it-olympics-web-strategy-comes-up-a-loser/ and http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/18/twitter-nbc-olympics-sucks/.
So regardless of who gets the credit for the information display, the poor overall experience is certainly NBC’s.
Yet more insight into the negative reaction to NBC’s coverage: http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/28/how-we-hate-nbcs-olympics-coverage-a-statistical-breakdown/. I’m in the camp that there were too many non-sports segments. Thank goodness for TiVo!
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