Bill Simmons Trashes NBC Over Tape-Delayed Olympic Coverage, Hard-to-Find Broadcasts: It’s 2021, ‘How Can They F*ck This Up?’

Social justice messaging and protests by US Olympic athletes have been manipulated to explain depleted TV ratings for the Tokyo Games. But other explanations exist for the down viewership, such as fans struggling to find where and when specific events will air.

For the past two weeks, many US Olympic viewers have complained about NBC’s recently launched streaming platform Peacock, and its poor user experience. Among them is Bill Simmons, founder of The Ringer, who lashed out at NBC’s streaming service on his recent podcast.

“Peacock. AKA The Cock,” Simmons began, sending guest co-hosts Joe House and Wosny Lambre into a fit of laughter.

“Peacock has been showing the basketball,” Simmons continued. “They’re showing it at weird hours. After the games end, they don’t have replays of the game. you have to basically go on Twitter, search for the game and hope there’s a clip on there and then about seven hours later they’ll show a seven-minute recap of the game.”

“How can they f*ck this up?” Simmons asked. “How hard is this? There’s so many basketball fans, how do they mess this up?”

Although Peacock has been available for over a year, it wasn’t until the Tokyo Olympics that the platform became more relied on for sports than reruns of The Office throughout the US.

“I’m still an old school cable, satellite guy. Channel 4 is NBC, channel 40 on cable is USA. Then 314 is NBC Sports Network. CNBC, I don’t even know where that is on my cable system,” Simmons said. “I feel like I’m spending half the time flying around just trying to find what to watch and then half the sh*t is tape-delayed.”

“I just can’t believe we still screw this up,” Simmons added. “It’s 2021, how do we screw this up?!”

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!