ZBM's Olympic Adventures

They've taken a lot of heat, some of it misdirected (seems like Cablevision was passing the buck, for once), but it would appear that Bermuda Broadcasting has been trying hard to deliver a comprehensive Olympics package in recent days. They've delivered coverage from NBC, CMC and CBC (Canada) over the past few days, which ought to get us better overall coverage than any other country singularly.

Unfortunately today highlighted another misstep from the company's button-pushers. This morning we were shown CMC coverage, which predictably showed track and field. The coverage was live, which was great, however the commentary slanted too much towards the 100m and there was an analysis piece thrown up which interrupted the women's 3000m steeplechase, which promised to be interesting to watch.

Anyway, we were all set for the live 11:30am (Bermuda time) 100m women's finals... then at 11am we're thrown for a loop and sent to NBC which was focusing their morning coverage on a women's basketball match, the USA versus cannon fodder. While I already have my beefs with NBC for choosing to showcase Americans blowing out some other team (in this case New Zealand) over an event that's more competitive, I was stunned that the ZBM monkeys couldn't wait until the 100m live event was over.

I'm assuming that ZBM had preprogrammed the feed switches to something like 1am switch to CBC, 7am switch to CMC, 11am switch to NBC, lather rinse repeat, instead of a station manager making the decisions on which feed to show at what time.

Sucks, but I'm still giving ZBM a B for effort instead of the F that Gazette readers have been blasting over the past few days.