2004 Olympics TV coverage

Here’s a primer on this year’s Olympic telecasts:

“ When: The opening ceremony will air 5 p.m. Friday on NBC. If you can’t wait for that, however, some preliminary soccer games will air Wednesday and Thursday on MSNBC and Telemundo. The closing ceremony is Aug. 29; in between, the coverage will sprawl over NBC and six of its cable or broadcast channels.

“ The channels: They are CNBC, MSNBC, USA Network, Bravo, Telemundo and the separate high-digital signal sent by many NBC stations.

“ What’s missing: NBC also owns the Sci Fi Channel, which isn’t currently scheduled to air Olympic coverage. That channel would be helpful if the Games become intergalactic. Or if ancient Greeks return via time travel. Or if pole-vaulters begin to vanish in mid-air.

“ Who gets these channels: Most cable homes. USA airs in 88 million homes, which are almost all the ones with cable. CNBC reaches 86 million homes, MSNBC 82 million, and Bravo 76 million. “Bravo picked up another four or five million homes when it was first announced that they were going to carry the Olympics,” says Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Sports. The other two channels are harder to define. NBC’s high-definition channel must be launched by individual stations; NBC says its high-definition signal is within reach of 80 percent of TV homes. Telemundo, a Spanish-language network, is on a combination of 47 stations and almost 450 cable systems; combining them, it says it reaches 91 percent of Hispanics in the United States.

“ The time gap: The games are in Athens, 10 time zones away from the Pacific Zone. At 5 p.m. PDT it’s 3 a.m. in Greece.

“ Hours of coverage: If you only get NBC, you’ll still have 226 hours of Olympics over 17 days. By comparison, the 1992 games had 171.5 hours; the 1976 ones had 76.5 hours.

“ Overall hours: It all adds up to 71 hours of coverage on a typical weekday, if you count the reruns. Overall, NBC says it will have 1,210 hours over seven channels; in 2000, it had 441.5 hours over three channels.

“ Specific events: The exact details are still being worked out. They’ll be listed on two Web sites, nbcolympics.com and tvguide.com — and on the TV Guide Channel, which airs on many cable systems.

“ The general plans have been set, however. Here they are, for each network:

NBC

There are 28 Olympic sports, but Ebersole expects 60 percent of prime time coverage to stick to four of them — swimming, diving, gymnastics and track and field. By no coincidence, those are sports (along with basketball) that Americans expect to do well in.

Other sports will pop in occasionally, he says, especially such telegenic ones as beach volleyball. “They built a stadium right on the sea that’s drop-dead great.”

USA Network

There will be only 49 hours of coverage, starting Aug. 15. That’s when the women’s cycling road race will start winding through Athens.

The next weekend, Aug. 21-22, USA will carry the tennis finals. The network also expects to have live coverage of most U.S. basketball games, for men and women.

CNBC

On weekdays, this will be the home of boxing coverage. On weekends, boxing moves to MSNBC. CNBC — with 111 hours total — will range from beach volleyball to soccer and tae kwon do.

MSNBC

This becomes the boxing network on weekends. During the week, MSNBC — with 133.5 hours total — ranges afar. It has soccer — including opening matches Aug. 11-12, before the opening ceremony — plus basketball, soccer, beach volleyball, wrestling, canoeing, rowing and weightlifting,

Bravo

There will be 122 hours, including tennis, equestrian, sailing, archery, badminton, judo, handball, table tennis, synchronized swimming and the track cycle races.

HDTV

The idea of doing high-definition coverage came late, Ebersol says. Broadcasters from other countries were surveyed.

“They (said), ‘We want to have HD coverage of track and field, swimming and diving, gymnastics, the opening and closing ceremonies, the basketball medal rounds and the soccer stadium,’” Ebersol says. “That takes place in four stadiums that are contiguous to each other.”

Those sports will show up on the high-definition channel with the others being ignored for now. The catch is that the same sports are on NBC’s prime time. HDTV won’t be showing them until afterward.

Every sport shown in high-definition in 2008.