Because the Salt Lake 2002 Winter Games are only two hours behind the eastern time zone, Canadian viewers will get a record amount of live coverage at prime time.
CBC senior executive producer Joel Darling said “being able to get the major events in prime time is a real bonus”.
CBC will carry 250 hours of Olympic coverage over 17 days, usually starting at 11 a.m. and running through 1 a.m., but there will be breaks for the evening news at 5:30 p.m. and the national news at 11 p.m.
TSN will add another 125 hours, times depending on how the various events are scheduled.
Darling says all of Canada’s men’s hockey games will be on the CBC and 95 per cent of the figure skating, as well as significant curling matches and women’s hockey games. Meanwhile TSN will get the luging and bobsledding, as well as some women’s hockey.
Because there are fewer events than in Sydney, only one or two events will be run at the same time as hockey games.
NBC spokesperson Mike McCarley says, like CBC, NBC will be farming out a lot of its coverage to cable networks CNBC and MSNBC. “They’l be carrying a lot of the competition that normally don’t get coverage”. NBC will also be showing far more live competition than it did in Sydney. NBC will probably be on the air every night from 8 to 11 p.m.
