So, now that today's the final day, were the Olympics a success or not?

Here in the US, all the articles I've seen mumble about how the ratings were low (well, except it *did* beat "Skating with Celebrities" . But when did the Olympics get the best ratings? I can't really remember.

In my opinion, the problem is that none of the events were really live, except hockey and curling - and those were during the afternoon. By the time the events were broadcast, people who wanted to know the results had already looked it up online, called their friends in other countries, or listened to the radio/watched the news.

I also think that with the winter Olympics, you don't get as many people as the summer Olympics - there aren't really as many 'big' sports as the summer games.

I really miss having my Canadian coverage - living on the border, I got spoiled with having both US and Canadian coverage to choose from. (And, I believe, more of Canada's coverage was live and they covered more countries than just the home country.)

Another problem was figuring out when the coverage was on and which channel it was going to be airing on. This year, NBC kept switching between NBC, USA, MSNBC and CNBC so you never knew what channel coverage was going to be on unless you kept remembering to check the listings.

And most of NBC's coverage seemed to be 'ok, here's what happened at Salt Lake' or 'here's what happened a couple days ago' instead of what that day's events were.

So what are your opinions? How was coverage of the games in your country?

In Norway the winer olymics where shown on TV most of the day during the last 16 days, and if you missed something on TV you could pay a small amount and see it on web-TV. So the coverage is really good.

but the rest wasn't that good. This winter OL was Norways worst since 1988.

The coverage in New Zealand was about what you would expect in a small country that does not do well at Winter Olympics. We only had the opening and closing ceremonies live but did have 3 hours of highlights in the morning and 3 hours late at night (less ads/commercials of course). I suppose that with Turin being 12 hours behind, there would not be many people watching live events in the early hours of the morning.

Here in Oz i'd say it was the least interesting coverage i can recall. It was broadcast in primetime, which means on about an 18 hour delay! So apart from knowing the results already.
Is it just me or are "they" just making up sports as they go along for the winter Olympics. And whats with all the judging of events. Hello Racing? Anyone heard of that. Why isnt the ski jumping about distance only? It is my long held belief that any sport that requires a judge to give it a score should be given the boot. With the natural exception of anything we're good at.
I love the skiing, being Dutch I love the speed skating and i've got a thing for the double luge, ahem.
And how many of these damn figure skating events are there now, come on one for guys one for girls and one for pairs, thats all we need. Ice Dancing, whats that? Are they gonna bring in Ice Line dancing next, maybe Ice Macarana.
It takes some ordinary sport to have me looking for forward to the Commonwealth Games but bring em on!

Well, I'm in the US as well, but my perspective might be a little different. I LOVE the winter games. Particularly skating events (speed skating as well as figure skating, and hockey of course) and snowboarding. I would set my DVR to record the primetime coverage and the hockey games I wanted to see (which were admittedly limited to my own country, and primarily womens' hockey). Sometimes I'd watch it with my daughter, sometimes I'd wait until she was a sleep and FF through commercials and events that didn't interest me. Even though coverage switched between channels, NBC's online listings were very easy to use, and I checked them daily at work to see what I needed to record the next day. And even when my boss TRIED to tell me what the results were ahead of time, my response was "Were you just about to tell me the results of the event I'm going to watch tonight? Just Shush!" In short, I thought it was wonderful as usual. The only thing I would have liked was a little more attention to non-US athletes. The only backstory we got in figure skating, as an example, was on Americans or gold-medal favorites, all Russians. And the woman who won gold, Shizuka Arakawa, well, if there was any backstory on her, I didn't see it. That frustrated me.

Here in the Netherlands we had Olympics on TV as far as the eye could see! Live coverage of lots of events, and if there were more events at the same time you could watch the rest for free online on several live streams. I LOVE the Winter Olympics, so I have been watching hours and hours of speed skating (which was the only event resulting in gold for the Netherlands), biathlon and ski jumping. Actually, I'll take the Winter Olympics over the Summer Olympics any day.

What Quoge said - pathetic.