Olympics: Live Sports & News

I started using this app late--I should have started sooner. The quality of the commentary was better here--the man, in particular, is more culturally aware because he is better educated. In addition, there are no ads here! However, it could have been even better if there had been captions in many languages, and a very brief synopsis of each opera character in the closing ceremony. In addition, the Airplay was not working properly--I could use Airplay only by mirroring my entire phone--I could not mirror the app or website only. However, I was also using a VPN and lockdown mode--both the app and website should be compatible with both. Apps should be developed for Samsung and LG TVs.

The app fellows to always list your favorite athletes events. You always have to look for the athlete all over again and then click and click and click and click until you finally find out what the race was and what the outcome of the race was. Another pet peeve is, if you want to watch a replay of an event, and you click on the Peacock icon to watch it on the Peacock app that’s installed on your phone, I get an error message that claims that my player is unable to play the video. But then I read the fine print you should be able to watch the replay on your Peacock app in an iPhone, iPad or PC or a Mac. So this last claim is obviously not true. When I try to find the events or favorite athletes on the Peacock app installed on my Apple TV device, Peacock sort of has sections, but you have to sort and scroll through so much content just to get to what to see.

The app is not very intuitive or user friendly. For example, if I want to find out how the men’s decathlon ended, then I cannot easily find it. There is no search function. There are pages and pages and pages of start times, and three cryptic letters: ATH. There is lots of space next to the time and these three letters to spell out which competition it actually is, but that hasn’t been done, so you’re just looking at a few hundred ATH start times, and you have to click on everyone of them, to see what it is. You also cannot find in which sports a certain country has medaled. E.g. Germany has 10 Gold medals - but which discipline? Extremely time consuming to figure it out with this app, it needs a complete overhaul.

(Updated from 1 star to 3 stars because some problems were corrected.) The pages load fast, but the settings still need to be improved: (1) We need to have more than one favorite team; at least 3 favorites would be good - many of us have multi-national families, friends, and business colleagues. (2) We need to be able to pick more than 8 favorite sports to follow, or else we need to be able to select some broader categories as well as individual events. At least 12 would help. For example, I would like to choose “Swimming / Diving” and get ALL the swimming and diving events including the synchronized swimming; “Martial Arts” and get Karate, Judo, TaeKwanDo and anything else considered a martial art; and “Cycling” and get everything that uses a bicycle. (3) The app needs a landscape view for iPad and other tablets.

This app has been around since at least the last Olympic Games, yet is still not user friendly. Professional interface engineers need to apply best practices with user feedback to improve the usability. Too many hoops to jump through (too many clicks to desired info) and insufficient user customization of the interface. Why are event times in military time with no time zone provided? We can assume it’s local to the Olympic site, but how do we know? It could also be GMT. And why can’t we just select our time zone in settings and see all events at the time they occur in our own time zone? As it stands now, we have to covert military time to regular civilian time and then figure out what time zone the Olympic site is in (Japan this year) and then figure out the difference between the time in Japan and the time in our own town and then covert! Just let me set my time zone!