The Winter Olympics 2014 Opening Ceremony comes on TV and will start on the primary NBC channel on Friday, February 7 after the first night of the games begins and this year the event will not be live streamed online from NBCOlympics.com and will feature a huge spectacle in Sochi, Russia to introduce the games.
The opening event will begin on Friday night and features the introductions to all the nations and their athletes and it is expected to be on TV from 7:30 pm ET to 11:30 pm and could run a bit later, which it did during the last Olympics. NBC feels that live streaming the event will take away some of the spectacle, according to Variety.com and the network will be airing thousands of hours of other footage and live events from the entire Winter Olympic games.
The Sochi event has been under waves of criticism for money spent, corruption, human rights violations and for the fact that the town is a resort city, but Russia does not care about any of this and they hope that people simply forget about the terrorist threats and danger so they can make themselves look all great and powerful. The games have spent over $50 billion and Vladimir Putin doesn't care about what people think of him putting money in his friend's pockets and now the games are less than two weeks from starting up.
Matt Lauer, Meredith Vieira and Bob Costas will be hosting the event for NBC and it will not be online this time around and Variety reports that NBCU will talk about the possibility of doing the same for the closing ceremonies. The competition starts up in 10 days officially and the night before the opening it will have preliminary rounds for a number of events, including the snowboarding, freestyle skiing as well as figure skating and then after that there will be more events on the following day and NBC has the coverage.
Check here for the NBC schedule of the events or for more from SWR.
