Did NBC Show This?

U.S. water polo team upsets top-ranked Croatia!

I played water polo in college. If you are unfamiliar with water polo, I like to describe it as a combination of ice hockey and basketball played in a pool. I think the offensive strategy is similar to basketball, but instead of a basket, there is a goal and a goalie similar to ice hockey. Plus, there is a penalty box, so you have power plays like hockey. It’s really a fun game to both play (actually it’s pretty brutal to play…a lot happens below the water…) and watch.

You will never find a water polo game on TV…except during the Summer Olympics.  And even then, it is nearly impossible to find. They usually run it at 3am and maybe show 5 minutes chunks of the game.

I have a Tivo Wishlist to find water polo, but I don’t have it set to auto-record. Why? Because you can never tell where in the broadcast the glimpses of water polo will come. I’d rather not record 8 hours of programming to have to continually fast forward to find the 20 minutes of water polo coverage.

It turns out that NBC has online coverage of water polo, but I have to jump through hoops to see it. I use Firefox, but I have to use Internet Explorer to watch the video. I thought I’d give it a shot, but I also have to install a something called NBC Direct on my PC and that really annoys me and I refuse to do it. Not only that, but the NBC Direct application is still a beta version. How could they not have the final version of something that millions of people (minus me of course) will use ready for the Olympics?!?

NBC is one of the investors of hulu.com (which is a great site, by the way). It makes sense that they can’t show the live coverage on hulu.com, but it would make sense to publish all of the video on hulu.com after the fact.

Overall, I enjoy Olympic coverage (Michael Phelps 100m butterfly win was probably the most thrilling Olympic event thus far).  I don’t really get NBC, though. They show the Olympics on NBC, CNBC, Universal HD, and USA, but they still don’t show enough. I haven’t seen anything other than boxing and softball on CNBC and Universal HD. Verizon FiOS also has two extra Olympic HD channels dedicated to Soccer and Basketball, but those only seem to have live programming and most of the time show nothing. Why can’t they just run those channels 24 hours and show other sports that never get any airtime?

Obviously, I’m frustrated.

My only hope to see water polo is for the U.S. to get into the medal round. My fingers are crossed.