The Olympics are supposed to be the ultimate showcase of human athletic achievement. But in 2024, they’ve become something else: a welter of apps, streams, and time-shifted events that leaves even dedicated sports fans scratching their heads.
Navigating the maze of NBC‘s Peacock app, with its various tiles for “Primetime in Paris,” “Late Night,” and multiple “Live” feeds, feels like it requires an advanced degree in content navigation. It’s often unclear what you’ll get when you click on a feed — live competition, earlier highlights, or studio discussion of events you haven’t seen yet. Even when you do stumble upon network coverage, there’s a good chance you’re watching events that happened hours ago. The urge to just Google the results can be strong, creating a strange limbo where the Games are “live,” but not really live at all.
This fragmentation means amazing athletic feats are happening in a vacuum. Take Teddy Riner, the 6-foot-8-inch, 315-pound French judoka who just won his third individual Olympic gold medal at age 35. This guy is arguably more dominant in his sport than Simone Biles is in gymnastics. But unless you knew to dig through Peacock’s labyrinth of judo coverage, you probably missed it entirely. Riner’s victory with a textbook ashi guruma throw — one of judo’s original 40 techniques — should have been a highlight reel moment. For me, it was relegated to the depths of an app, divorced from any meaningful context or commentary.
Of course, the time zone difference doesn’t help, creating an awkward situation where social media reacts to results hours before they air in prime time. This disconnect between real-time results and broadcast schedules further erodes the shared viewing experience.
Even basic facts about the Games can be hard to pin down, as exemplified by the controversy surrounding Algerian boxer Imane Khelif. After her victory over Italy’s Angela Carini, social media erupted with various heavyweight influencers making wild claims about Khelif’s biological sex. These rumors stemmed from her disqualification from a 2023 championship, allegedly due to failing gender eligibility tests. However, the International Olympic Committee had cleared Khelif to compete, criticizing her earlier disqualification as “sudden and arbitrary.”
This confusion isn’t unique to the Olympics. It’s symptomatic of a broader shift in how we consume media, especially sports. As I wrote recently about professional wrestling, what was once a shared cultural experience can easily become fragmented across countless streaming services and apps. WWE, for instance, will soon have its content spread across Netflix, USA Network, Peacock, and the CW. UFC fights are split between its own Fight Pass and ESPN+. For fans, keeping up with even a single sport can require multiple subscriptions and a detailed viewing schedule.
The current landscape is challenging for both providers and viewers. However, there’s reason to believe this fragmentation won’t last forever. Just as the early days of streaming saw a proliferation of services before some consolidation, promising signs are emerging in sports broadcasting. Aggregator apps are becoming more sophisticated, smart TVs are better at integrating different streaming services, media conglomerates are further consolidating, and there’s growing pressure to simplify the viewing experience.
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The Olympics, with their global appeal and diversity of events, will play a major role in this evolution. Imagine a future Olympic broadcast that seamlessly blends traditional coverage with algorithmically personalized streams, allowing viewers to easily follow their favorite sports or athletes across multiple platforms. We’re not there yet, but the current confusion — still better than what we had to do when watching the Tokyo Olympics three years ago, both from a content aggregation and time-zone standpoint — is likely a transitional phase. The technology exists to create a more cohesive viewing experience. What’s needed now is the will to implement it.
In the meantime, the Games themselves remain as impressive as ever. The athletes continue to push the boundaries of human performance, even if the infrastructure for sharing those achievements hasn’t quite kept pace. Amazing feats of athleticism like Teddy Riner’s are still out there, waiting to be discovered. It might take a bit more effort to find them, but for true sports fans, the reward is worth it. After all, isn’t that spirit of perseverance what the Olympics are all about?
Oliver Bateman is a journalist, historian, and co-host of the What’s Left? podcast. Visit his website: www.oliverbateman.com.