Over the weekend, NBC says it racked up record-breaking numbers for Olympic viewing. The U.S. audience for the opening ceremony, although delayed seven hours, garnered 40.7 million viewers, and Saturday's primetime audience reached 28.7 million, two million more than watched the 1996 games in Atlanta in that time slot.
The network, though, may be setting another record, one for tweets by disgruntled watchers. Among the hashtags where grousing about the network has been posted are #nbcfail, #nbcdelayed and #nbcsucks.
Tape delays of events have spawned a stream of tweets mocking NBC's sense of timeliness in covering events. Those tweets are typically slugged with "BREAKING" followed by news such as "Orville and Wilbur Wright's machine flies," "Mark Spitz wins gold in 100m freestyle," and "Roman Emperor Theodosius bans Olympic Games, NBC delay to catch up shortly."
Other tweeters address the event delays more directly. "NBCNot Broadcasting Coverage of the Olympics until 5 hours later," complained .
Another Twitter subscriber, , added: "BREAKING: USA wins gold medal in synchronized NBC bashing. Tune in to NBC tomorrow for coverage of the event."
Advertising has been a burr to many Olympic watchers on Twitter. "Is car advertising an Olympic sport?" asked , of the Independent. "There's been little else on NBC today."
"#NBCSUCKS with random commercials during live Internet feeds," complained . "Right in the middle of a gymnastics routine!"
Commentary by the Peacock Network has also been a target of derision on Twitter. "NBC just described women Olympian gymnasts as emotional divas," reported. "Male athletes are determined and passionate."
Perceived athletic jingoism by the NBC team drew this left-handed jibe from Twitter subscriber T--W: "Another thing that's amazing: BBC's commentators aren't afraid to praise other countries who deserve it."
While NBC is offering live streaming of Olympic events, its Internet presence hasn't been working smoothly for some of its Twitter critics. "It's just taken me an hour to log into NBC streaming Olympics coverage," reported .
Its app isn't faring much better for some. "NBC live app total fail," wrote . "Ads load but not Olympics."
Twitter had its own problems leading up to the Olympic Games. The day before the opening ceremony, the for about an hour and half.
According to a number of media watchers and IT professionals, the Olympics will have a on worldwide communications traffic so more disruptions may be in the cards for Twitter users. NBC, though, probably won't be complaining when such outages occur.
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