Olympic technology

A busy few days between the Detroit Symphony Orchestra French Festival (programs 3 & 4 this week) and Olympic figure skating – in addition to the other things I do. Watching the Olympics has been a technological adventure.

I bought my TV in 1982. No big deal because for the last few years I turn it on maybe a half-dozen times a year. Connected to it is a VCR machine given to me by my friend and debate partner because he wasn’t using it anymore (back during the Winter Olympics of 2014). Though not used much the TV is showing its age. It used to take a half hour to warm up and clear the snow (yeah, it is connected to cable) and when I turned it on earlier this past week it was still snowy after an hour. So while I could watch opening ceremonies on it I decided to try live-streaming, which worked pretty well.

Then came the men’s figure skating short program Thursday evening. That afternoon I couldn’t get live-streaming to work. All I got was the network logo and 3 blinking lights saying it is thinking. Never anything more, never an error message. I called my internet provider. They were unable to help and sent my case to the team that handled difficult cases. They were to call back within 24 hours.

I watched it live – well, the TV was on all evening and I looked at it about every 15 minutes to see if they had stepped away from skiing. I think they went to skating around 10:00. The network broke for news a bit after 11:00 with comments that the best skaters were still to come. So I recorded to about 1:30 am.

I watched it Friday morning. And what I thought was advertised as prime time viewing actually ended around 1:00 am. Glad I didn’t wait up.

So Friday evening I set the VCR to record the men’s long program, setting it for 8 pm to 1 am, and went off to the concert. While I was gone that call finally came.

I called them Saturday afternoon. I spent an hour on the phone with the technician. He couldn’t get it to work with Firefox, my browser of choice, so we switched to Chrome (which is installed, but rarely used). He finally determined that Adobe Flash was out of date. Not surprising, since Firefox doesn’t play well with Flash and never gets used. So I did a Flash update and some browser tweaking and I got live-streaming to work on Chrome.

Back on Firefox I tried it and finally got an error message: Flash is out of date and is a security risk.

So back to Chrome. The video of the men’s long program wasn’t easy to find. A few listed streams were the highlights – such as a particular skaters several quad jumps. The tech guy persevered and found how I could watch 3 hours of the event. But it was time to prepare for the evening concert.

This afternoon and evening I watched it – all 3 hours. And a zillion commercials. I found I could not jump over the commercials. And if I happened to back up a bit to far I had to wait through a batch of them again. It didn’t take long to find the mute.

I think there were 30 men in the short program. On what I had recorded I saw the Americans and the top six. Out of those 24 advance to the long program and are put in blocks of six skaters according to their standings after the short program. In this 3 hour video I saw blocks 4, 3, and 2. I enjoyed American Nathan Chen’s wonderful performance, a rebound after a disastrous short program that left an expected medalist in 17th place (he won the long program and finished 5th). There was also gay American Adam Rippon in a fabulous performance. He didn’t have the quad jumps of the leaders, so couldn’t earn a medal. Even so, he was excellent at what he did.

But there was no block 1 in this video, nothing of the top six.

I did find separate videos of the performances of the medal winners. But not of the other three in the block.

Strange.

Rippon’s competition is over. In the men’s program he placed 7th in the short program and 10th in the long program, for an overall position of 10th. In the team competition, which I didn’t watch, he and the USA team took bronze. Quite good. For the second week of the Olympics he has been hired by NBC. And once back in America he won’t be taking his bronze medal to the White House.

Live streaming worked well enough that I will probably use it for ice dancing and ladies programs.