Had a frustrating weekend trying to tune the family into the Olympics. Eventually I may work out the bugs in our "personal Olympics experience," but it is amazing to me that this day and age of "advanced interactive video" technology, it is so difficult as a consumer to find what you want. Here's a list of problems I've encountered: * The NBCOlympics.com Website is broken. Seriously. I had ditched Internet Explorer (IE) almost entirely until I came across the NBCOlympics.com Website. First, you MUST have Microsoft's Silverlight technology, of course -- even though the only people that have or care about Silverlight are a few product managers in Redmond. After spending 30 minutes trying to get Silverlight to work with Firefox and realizing it wasn't going to happen, I went back to my IE. Turned out I had to upgrade IE and reinstall Silverlight. * This brings up a serious problem with navigation and the video footage on the Olympics Website: We missed the women's mogul competition (mostly because we couldn't figure out when it was on TV -- more on that below), so I was trying to find footage on the Website to show my kids before we went skiing. After at 45 minutes, I found the one clip of the gold medalist, Hannah Kearney, and after spending 15 minutes waiting for the video to buffer and watching commercials, we got to see the clip. I'd say the work/entertainment ratio was about 5/1. I wanted to show them another clip but there were no more. Really, NBC? * Apparently to make the video clips on the NBC Website you have to be 1) An American that wins a gold medal, or 2) Apolo Ohno. Apolo Ohno's family is having a lot of fun on the Web. * The kids are pumped up about the Olympics. I wanted to see what we could DVR and and what we could watch live through the  "extensive NBC coverage" on multiple cable channels. DirectTV was no help in navigating Olympics coverage. So I went to the TV guide on the Website. Apparently, there are huge bugs in the "interactive TV schedule" on NBCOlympics.com  I couldn't get it to work at all. Here is a screen shot below of what NBC's  "simple and comprehensive interactive TV schedule" gave me:

Hmm. Nothing. Thanks NBC. That's right -- zilch. De Nada. Apparently there are no Olympics today? Is that because not enough people have installed Silverlight? I thought I had installed every Microsoft-dictator technology on the planet.  Stay tuned: the Olympics will resume when it stops raining in Vancouver and Microsoft has 80% marketshare in the Silverlight market. * Despite the fact that every satellite truck and videographer on the planet must be in Vancouver, it seems like you can't actually watch any Olympic sports live on TV. Remember that: "En Vivo." What happened?  Even though NBC has Olympics feeds running on CNBC, MSNBC, and NBC-Universal, when I look for stuff on any of those channels all I seem to find are old Patrick Swayze movies or CNBC documentaries on financial derivatives . What happened to the men's mogul prelims?  Speed skating? Couldn't find them. Enough of Patrick Swayze and Bear Stearns, already. * A big part of the problem, other than the fact that I couldn't get NBC's "comprehensive and simple interactive TV guide" to work, was that The DirectTV programming guide for the Olympics sucks. It looks like the only way to find Olympics coverage is via their "Sports Mix" interactive guide, but at any one time I can only find one Olympic feed I don't want to watch -- you know,  a third-rate Danish Biathlon contestant trudging through the rain. If you are looking for old replays of Lakers games on the NBA Channel, they have plenty of them, though. * The prime-time coverage on NBC is ridiculous -- 35 hours of Bob Costas interviews and sentimental athlete profiles followed by a 25-second clip of an American winning. Then you get 5 minutes of commercials. This is not user-friendly. In this day and age of sophisticated digital video, targeted content, "customization," location-aware devices, DVRs, e.t.c., shouldn't there we any easier way for you to program your personal Olympic experience and watch what you want to watch when you want to watch it? I was thinking about all of this when I came across Steve Donohue's tour of the Cablevision Olympics interactive programming guide. This is a lot closer to what I've been looking for! Unfortunately I don't live in a Cablevision district, but it looks like it's well done. Lesson for DirectTV, NBCOlympics, and others: This is closer to giving people what they want. Steve's video: