By all measures NBC did a pretty good job covering the olympics including arranging for swimming and gymnastics finals to be held in the morning so they could broadcast live to the US.  Still, I came away wanting more from their coverage.  I almost never watch TV, but I did watch a huge amount of olympic coverage each night and still never saw any of the classic events (discus, shot, javelin, long jump, decathalon etc etc).

Maybe they aired on other NBC channels, I don’t know, but what I really wanted was the ability to see any event I wanted when I wanted.  When Usain Bolt broke the 100 and 200m records I wanted to watch it *right then* not read about it on the front page of NYT.com with some BS stop gap photos.  I understand NBC wanted to make sure they generated the ad revenue to cover their $160M+ payout but still, it is lame to make me wait until prime time TV to watch the results of a race I already knew who won.  I would have gladly paid to have access to high quality online video of each event when I wanted to watch it, but maybe I am in the minority.