Canadian TV coverage of the Vancouver Olympics won't be available here

With the opening of the Vancouver Winter Olympics just five weeks away, Northwest fans may be planning to tune in to the games once again on Canadian television, where they grew accustomed to live, relatively unfiltered coverage of the action.

Most of them will be out of luck.

For the first time since 1992, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC) won't be covering the games. That leaves most Seattle-area cable subscribers with no opportunity to catch the Vancouver games on Canadian television.

CTV, the largest privately owned network in Canada, outbid CBC for the broadcast rights in that country. But CTV is available almost nowhere in the state of Washington.

A local spokesman for Comcast, the primary cable carrier in the area, said, "We don't carry CTV anywhere in Washington and don't have plans to carry it for the Olympics." Apparently, CTV is also not available on satellite in this area.

A CTV spokeswoman said some neighboring U.S. cities do get the network, but "we do not negotiate directly with the Seattle-based cable and satellite providers."

Most Olympics fans will have little choice but to watch the big Olympic events on NBC, which holds the rights to the games in the United States.

NBC's coverage, which is shown on KING-5 in the Seattle area, promises to be exhaustive.

But the premier events won't be shown live here. Instead, they are either carried live or taped for prime-time coverage on the East Coast — and then further delayed for prime time in the West.

Many fans in past years have found that they preferred not only CBC's live coverage, but also its straightforward style, which focused on the events themselves and tended to give equal coverage to athletes of all nations.

NBC's coverage has tended to be more personality-driven, loaded with profiles of athletes, as well as a general focus on Americans.

Still, NBC is advertising that it will have more coverage than ever, available on NBC and its affiliates: USA, MSNBC, CNBC and Universal, along with their HD channels. Coverage of past Olympic highlights will be available on Comcast On Demand.

NBC is particularly enthusiastic about Universal, a network that didn't exist in 2006 when the last Winter Olympics were held.

Universal, reported recently to be available in 57 million homes in the United States, will carry five different studio programs from 7 a.m. to noon each day, according to the The New York Times. It will also offer live Olympic updates from 7:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. and a 24-hour news ticker, the Times reported.

Universal Sports is broadcast locally on KING'S digital channel, KING 5.2. On Comcast, that is channel 115.

But the big events — think the women's figure-skating final or the men's gold-medal ice-hockey game — will be reserved for NBC's prime-time coverage.

And Seattle-area fans won't have any choice but to wait hours to watch events happening just 100 miles away.

Bob Condotta: 206-515-5699 or bcondotta@seattletimes.com.