Once upon a time, the Olympics were broadcast on both ITV and the BBC. For a lot of the time, they’d show the same events, and if you were interested in a minority sport, you could probably forget it unless a Brit had a chance of a medal.
Now coverage might be “limited” to the BBC, but because of digital television, just about anything you want to watch is available to see. On satellite and cable, the BBC is offering six different streams of video (in addition to whatever their main services are showing), and there are a choice of three streams on Freeview. So we can all hit that red button and watch pretty much what we like.
But while it’s great, there are a few issues that need to be overcome that are brought about largely because the Olympics are taking place in Beijing and therefore many events will be taking place in the small hours of the morning and through into the daytime. Primetime coverage will largely be highlights of what took place earlier that day.
And this means that digital video recorders come into their own if you want to watch full coverage of an event that took place earlier that day. But if you have Sky+ then that’s not going to help you. Because you enter the Open TV environment of interactive red-button technology, you’re not able to record video. As a result, you can’t set a Sky+ device to record in advance a sub-channel like those Olympic video channels.
Remote Record is another excellent Sky feature, but even there we have problems. It certainly isn’t a workaround for recording an interactive channel, but if I look at Saturday the BBC simply shows a programme called Olympics 2008 from 1.55am to 6.00am, followed by Olympic Breakfast from 6.00am to 11.00am, further followed by Olympics 2008, and so on. That doesn’t help me record individual sports, yet the BBC has already decided the broad running order if you look at the detail they display on their site. So it’s either record five hours at a time of BBC1, or watch live.
While Freeview might have fewer streams (although the temporary closure of BBC Parliament does mean three streams rather than two), you can at least choose programmes to record in advance on a Freeview digital video recorder – something Sky+ is unable to cope with. And that’s one area where a Freeview digital video recorder can trump Sky+.