The 2024 Summer Olympics Are Best as a Streaming Event

The 2024 Summer Olympics are unlike any I’ve seen before, mostly because I’m watching them in a completely different way. For many years, most of us in the U.S. watched the Olympics in digest format—a primetime collage that showed the pertinent snippets from the biggest competitions of the day, oftentimes many hours after they actually happened. Occasionally the timezone gods would bless us with something close to a live experience, but usually what we were seeing was old news. When the internet, particularly social media, began encroaching on this tradition—medal winners announced as they actually won, sometimes a half a day before NBC (or, briefly, CBS) would air their primetime package—I resented the intrusion of this newfangled real-time access. Why couldn’t we all just wait and be surprised together at night?

For the past few Olympics, I’ve certainly been aware that I could watch live events as they happened on TV if my schedule allowed—but I resisted. The hallowed nightly ritual felt like the Olympics to me, because that’s what it was when I was a kid. (Plus, who wants to go searching through a cable guide to find things?)

This, of course, was a losing indignation. People want information when they want it, and it became increasingly nonsensical to wish that everyone on the ground at the Olympics—or those watching daytime live feeds—would bite their tongues so people like me could enjoy the games in unspoiled peace. Adaptation has thus proven necessary. And, it turns out, has been a joy.

I’m not usually one to extol the virtues of streaming—but in the case of the Olympics, the technology has been a boon. NBC Universal has built out their Peacock platform to be a portal through which pretty much all Olympic events can be accessed. It is, essentially, the Olympics on demand, which indulges the completionist urges of someone like me without forsaking the traditional broadcast that others might still prefer. (NBC still airs one of those every night.) And the user experience has vastly improved since the games in Tokyo three years ago.

This past weekend, my partner and I found ourselves spending all day watching events we’d never seen before. There was the impossible arm strength of the kayak and canoe slalom events, a feat of rowing that looks so difficult it strangely loops back around to seeming easy. We enjoyed the women’s shooting events, particularly pistol, with its cyperpunk-esque costumery and the stern, cool efficiency of the competitors. Fencing is always fun, but could be hard to prioritize—or even find—in the days before streaming apps. Now, it’s right there, to be watched live or on replay. (And because there are not quite so many fencing spoilers swirling around social media as there are for an event like gymnastics, a delay of a few hours is no problem.)

If the sameness of, say, the diving competitions grows tedious—impressive as the athleticism is, one sort of has to be an expert in technical minutia to see much of a difference between the finalists—something else is available right next to it on the menu. Maybe this is a sorry testament to waning attention span, but it’s been an easy pleasure to watch a little of something—a mad dash in rugby, an impressive kill in beach volleyball—and then move on to explore what else is out there. If one competition sucks you in, there is no panic about missing something else. It will be waiting there for you afterwards. The same could not be said for the days when more obscure events would only air on NBCU’s disparate array of cable channels.

Still, there is one considerable drawback to the Peacock Olympics experience—one that it shares with much of modern media life. I do miss the sense of monoculture excitement that used to surround a big event like a gymnastics final. In the old days, there was the perhaps blinkered (and incorrect) assumption that the whole world was watching at once. Now, we’ve all fallen out of sync with one another. On the site once known as Twitter, in text messages, in the scattered interpersonal chatter of any given day, I don’t get the sense that we have all watched the same stuff at the same time, which feels like something of a loss.

That’s what streaming hath wrought; only on rare occasions does it seem that we are all huddled around the same fire. In the case of the Olympics, though, the trade-off is worth it. The competition might be more casual, less pomp and circumstance, in this select-and-play form: easily accessed at will rather than divinely beamed, tailored and unyielding, into our homes once nightly. But in return we get an expansive view of the games and, depending on which feed one is watching, the chance to see a fair amount of non-Americans compete. It’s by no means the entirety of the Olympics, but on a glorious all-day binge, it feels plenty close enough.