While we are still awaiting the Olympics opening ceremony on TV on the West Coast (oh the misery), and pretend it hasn’t happened almost a day into it, NBCOlympics.com is already abuzz with live feeds…the one on right now: Team and individual eventing dressage in horse racing…ah, the excitement. And five minutes into it, I am already missing the audio commentary…and this is me, who has bitched about the lame and parochial commentators from NBC Sports over the the years.

But some very cool features with the video streams: my favorite one is the ability to jump back into a specific point in the game, based on the text commentary in the video window. So for instance, if you are watching a football game, besides the live or archived stream, you can go back to a specific goal video point, by just click on the text commentary describing that goal. Then the four screen feed display is awesome, even though it is useless. It is akin to picture-in-picture on TV, with one specific game as the main screen, and three very small screens with other live games going on. You can pick and choose which games you want in those four windows. On advertising, well, “house ads” from GE dominate for now, both video and banner ads, so they are keeping it within the family.

Not to take away from the herculean effort from NBC online, but again, as I said before when going slightly overboard in my totalitarian reference, while the site has lots of buzz, it is not alive. That’s waiting for TV. Liz says it best: “We have to say we’re mighty frustrated to see evidence that the Olympics is happening all around us, but when we turn on NBC, we get Today Show hosts yapping about Chinese breakfast foods.” That was me watching it this morning and realizing the ceremonies were happening right behind them, when Ann Curry and others were live from outside the stadium.

I hope NBC reads some of the comments in the “NBC’s Totalitarian Olympics” post, and the frustration is real, even if a minority of us sports geeks…this one shows the changed nature of shared watching done online: “The opening ceremonies are on, I have friends who work across the world that are watching it LIVE and chatting with me about it and I have to tell them that it will be on LATER TODAY!  You’ve got to me effing kidding me!!  They will show hours or idiotic feel good stories on our athletes, but the OPENING CEREMONIES are recorded?  So what if most people are at work - just show the damn thing. I can’t wait till after 2012 till when they are done and someone with a better idea of what the Olympics is all about (a world event where we like to watch the best of the best - not just our country men and women.  Thank you, Numbskull Broadcasting Corp!” Again, histrionic, but you get the idea…