Got Olympics? I do!

Warning: contains a borderline indecent amount of bragging! ;-)

I greatly regret not recording my daily impressions on the London 2012 Olympic Games in this blog. In truth, I was simply too exhausted. Insomnia and jet lag in July and August resulted in poor sleep and groggy wake. I guess that when you're done watching 12 daily hours of sports, you don't much feel like adding to it by also writing about it!

However, I did do some recording that in the long run will prove to be even more valuable. In a post last month I explained my family's habit of recording a lot of sports. Well, I outdid myself for London 2012.

In Italy, where I watched, the Olympics were broadcast live by two networks: the national syndicate Rai and Rupert Murdoch's satellite platform Sky Sports. Rai offered a basic service with 10 daily hours of live HD broadcast, focusing primarily on Italian athletes but also showing all the important finals. Sky, instead, showed the whole thing, with 13 HD channels (one even in 3D) broadcasting 24/7 and covering every event from every sport, no exceptions whatsoever. Sky's truly outstanding package is easily the most comprehensive television coverage of any sporting event I have ever seen in my life.

I recorded from both networks. Rai is free-to-air, so I tallied a total of 1,156 Gigabytes of recordings on my PVR. These were all direct transport stream 1080i files with no filtering. After picking out what I cared to keep, I ended up with 232 Gigabytes, or 44 hours of high-definition video. As soon as I have the time (and the money), I will burn all that onto 15 Blu-rays for the ultimate Olympics collection. A good half of those recordings comes from athletics and swimming, which are by far my favorite sports, but virtually every discipline is represented to some extent.

Sky Sports, instead, heavily encrypts its high-definition signal with HDCP protection protocols. While illegal workarounds exist, I didn't feel like keeping up with the required tinkering; breaking copyright law is such hard work! ;-) So even as I watched everything in HD, I only recorded in standard definition. Even so, I ended up with 21 DVDs, or roughly 42 hours of material. Much of this is the same stuff that I also got from Rai, but with another commentating team, different court-side interviews, and even some exclusive camera work by Sky's team... in short, a varied enough experience to make it worth my time and resources to archive both.

If you think it's insane to fill up 36 disks with one edition of the Olympics, you are absolutely correct. As I already explained in many other posts this summer, I am indeed insane. Plus, this is pretty much my only real hobby. So there! (Don't even get me started on NBC's piss-poor, tape-delayed, jingo-happy "coverage": for once, I was sooooo very glad not to be in the US for this!)
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