Well, in any case..... you won't miss a single event of Olympics LIVE, if you are willing to get up at about 4 AM EST (or 1 AM PST) to see what will be starting around 9-10AM in London.
Chances are very HIGH that the TV programming will be adjusted to show the best Olympics stuff on prime time slots. I didn't actually know that MSNBC had a west coast and east coast feed, so that was actually new to me that the west coast was getting stuff 3 hours later on a NEWS channel that is supposed to broadcast NEWS live. Unless they just broadcasted it hours later for everyone of course.
The time zone of these games are going to be annoying for U.S. viewers, and so will the 2014 Winter Games in Russia. The games in Rio in 2016 are going to be interesting, being only 1 hour ahead of EST and 4 hours ahead of PST... but I am sure that there too they will show everything online for sure, its just a question whether they will show the main events live or not.
The biggest issue NBC has is that they have contract obligations with local stations that get half an hour of local news between 6 and 6:30, followed by national news, and half an hour of local news between 11:00 and 11:30, and they have to do this in 4 different time zones, so basically every hour for 4 hours straight one part of the country is "offline" to the national NBC feed, so to speak, so it is hard to fit in the live feeds at the same time.
Personally I would want them to provide the same feed they provide to EST time NBC to a cable station like MSNBC so we in PST can watch it at the exact same time, but the local affiliates would want the viewers around their news blocks and were very vocal about this in 2010.
I say we just tell them: Shove off for 2 weeks, and we'll show the Olympics.... but there is too many parties involved to do that. But then, I feel the same way about big shows like American Idol. It was REALLY ANNOYING to read on Facebook or Twitter who had been dropped that week, while the show wasn't even recorded on my DVR yet.
Basically, the West Coast gets shafted no matter what type of programming we watch.
If Facebook was around when Dallas aired on CBS in the 80ies, people would have been going OMG, WHO SHOT J.R.! before the West Coast would know what was going on.....
