You can get Games fix on TV, Web

Sixty-six pages. One major limb of a decent-sized tree.

That's how thick the detailed schedule — expected highlights included — is for NBC's Olympics coverage, which began Wednesday with a women's soccer match and ends with the closing ceremony Aug. 24.

What comes between those bookends should be fascinating — and perhaps unprecedented, given the ongoing tussles between network producers and Chinese officials about where TV cameras have a right to be, and when.

But there's no question it will be voluminous.

The hype for NBC — which paid a tidy $900 million for the right to station 106 commentators in Beijing this month — is all about total hours: 3,600 in all.

That's more coverage, the network likes to point out, than the combined total of all previous Olympic Games up to this point. It's three times the amount of Athens coverage in 2004.

We'll take their word for it. But the vast majority of those hours are events broadcast either on NBC's broad palette of cable stations, or on the Internet, where a whopping 2,400 of those 3,600 hours translate to streaming on nbcolympics.com.

The casual Olympic viewer who watches only the main peacock channel's nightly wrap-up shows will get the typical spoon-feeding: an 8 p.m.-to-midnight weekday highlight show, hosted by Bob Costas. Many of that show's events will have ended as much as 15 hours before, but a few, such as the swimming and gymnastics finals, will be broadcast live to the East Coast. Weekends will bring wall-to-wall, eight-hour coverage slots on the network with a few events, such as volleyball, arriving live to East Coast viewers.

Even those limited East Coast live prime-time slots were hard-won. NBC, clearly not happy with its ratings from less-time-zone-challenged locales such as Turin in 2006, squawked so loudly about the time difference that the Olympics broke with tradition and opted to stage those three sports in the mornings, purely for live prime-time broadcast to America.

Well, at least a part of America. As usual, the West Coast viewer gets shafted. NBC will take those few, golden, live-broadcast moments in their big prime-time daily show and put them on ice for three hours for West Coast viewers, insuring prime-time ad slots — and their accompanying fat rates.

The West Coast, to the peacock network, clearly remains Mayberry with rain forests. You folks out here in your Ice Station Zebra parkas should be used to being taken for granted by now.

Which is not to say that left coasties will be left completely out when it comes to live coverage. If you truly want to watch live events — and, in NBC's partial defense, many of these are going to be in the middle of the night here — and are willing to negotiate byzantine cable and satellite TV grids, options are out there.

Many team sports, such as soccer and volleyball, will be broadcast live on MSNBC, CNBC, Oxygen, Telemundo, Universal HD and USA-HD in the Seattle market. But it can get tricky: Not every cable or satellite provider offers all those choices. And a person living next door to you might get a sport live on USA-HD while you, watching USA's non-HD channel, will get it three hours delayed.

The phrase "consult your local listings," i.e., your on-screen TV grid, has never been more appropriate.

Confused yet? It gets worse. Some of you also have access, probably without even knowing it, to NBC Olympic soccer and basketball channels, adding yet another layer of nonstop coverage.

And many, many more live events will be available online. Viewers with flat-screen monitors and computer graphics cards with sufficient horsepower to make a big living-room picture might find viewing via broadband a palatable experience, if NBC's Olympic trials coverage was any indication.

Of course, ordinary TV viewers — at least those on Comcast — have a far superior "live" option. Simply tune into the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., which comes into many Puget Sound area homes via Vancouver's CBUT. The Canadian network will offer 2,400 hours of its usual straightforward, less-jingoistic approach to the Games with two blocks of six hours every day.

Unfortunately, most of CBC's live coverage falls from 3 to 9 a.m. Seattle time. But some prime-time events, such as swimming and gymnastics, will come into Seattle live — and well ahead of NBC — during CBC's daily 3 to 9 p.m. coverage slot. CBC also will simulcast much of its coverage online at cbcsports.ca.

Sadly, CBC is not an option for DirecTV subscribers, leaving a gaping hole in that major satellite provider's Olympics lineup.

All things considered, the Beijing Games will be a TV-grid fanatic's dream — and worst nightmare: Those with access to NBC, CBC and the cable affiliates, plus broadband access, will be able to watch an Olympic event at nearly any hour.

Say what you will about the content of the coverage — and trust us, we will, both here and on the Olympics blog (find it at www.seattletimes.com/Olympics) — but the one thing you can't say about Beijing Olympic coverage is that there's just not enough of it.