NBC Olympics coverage will be pervasive

By Michael Hiestand, USA TODAY Imagine the moon was colonized a few years after humans first landed. That's sort of what's happened to Olympic TV. NBC's Beijing TV schedule, released Tuesday, includes 2,900 hours of live TV coverage — including all 32 swimming finals and the team and individual finals in men's and women's gymnastics. Those live hours, spread across NBC and its cable TV outlets, top the total U.S. TV hours — 2,562 — for all previous Summer Games combined. Technically, that's possible because organizers in Beijing — 12 hours ahead of Eastern time — scheduled big-time morning action that NBC can air live in prime time. That's a break from the usual Olympic TV tactic of holding key events — as NBC did with a comparable time difference at the 2000 Sydney Games — so they can air in U.S. prime time. And NBC, as in... [read full story]