And the final Gold medal goes to…The BBC Olympic Coverage

For me, the biggest success of the 2012 Olympics has been the BBC’s unfaltering coverage of the games. More people than ever before turned to the web to consume Olympic content over the past two weeks and from start to finish the BBC iPlayer took the record viewing traffic in its stride.

One of my biggest concerns before the games began was how to follow 24 dedicated live channels and keep up to date with information on the athletes themselves. I have to admit I was skeptical as to whether the BBC could handle all the coverage without making a few mistakes – something that a Twitter wielding global audience wouldn’t take kindly to – but they managed to pull it off with style.

The BBC 2012 website was, and still is, a technological masterpiece. The Interactive schedules, detailed athlete bios, real-time updates and live video feeds gave us all the information we could possibly need during the Olympics, without overwhelming our senses. All within a mouse click or two. By combining the 24 dedicated TV channels, the BBC web site and the official London 2012 mobile apps, it was possible to stay up to date with the games in virtually any situation imaginable. Provided you had access to an internet connection of course.

Thanks to such an effortless viewing experience, combined with the ability to add events to my phone’s calendar from within the BBC web site, I found myself tuning in to far more coverage than I had originally planned to. This included sports that I had never intended to watch, such as Basketball, rowing and Taekwondo.

Thanks to some ingenious camerawork, mind bending bullet-time action and gratuitous slow motion footage, even the less exciting sports were a pleasure to watch. A testament to the level of detail and thought that must have gone into the recording process before, during and after each event. Exactly how they managed to pull off the clip below during a live event still baffles me.

The level of coverage, detail and interactivity has been nothing short of world class, arguably solidifying the BBC as the greatest media broadcast network in the world. The bar has been set so high that it is difficult to imagine any other country or broadcaster doing a better job. The 2016 Olympics in Rio has a lot to live up to and we haven’t even seen the paralympics yet.

After two Olympic ceremonies dedicated to showcasing the best of British, it’s the team that filmed the games themselves, alongside the incredible work of the 70,000 volunteers, that deserve the biggest applause. For me, the BBC is the unsung hero of the Olympic Games, now bring on the Paralympic Games coverage!

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• jasonpwright

  Mutual media masturbation Mr Masters.

• criticalguardian

  The BBC had an ideology to peddle, that’s a patronising nationalism that is nauseating
  and panders to the hard nationalists of the right flag wavering squad of illiterates.
  The BBC has been in the business of splitting the nation as a consequence of trying to manufacture a one nation tory political ideology of the 1950’s, but ends up offending vast amounts of people who don’t identify with this type of image making, and flag waving.
  The BBC is full of this kind of stuff, and we the licence fee payers have to foot the bill,
  even if you disagree with their obnoxious ideology peddling.
  The Olympics is one thing, but BBC nationalism is quite a different proposition.

• ram2009

  Don’t even mention Balding and the Chinese swimmer.

• http://www.facebook.com/gareth.hyde.79 Gareth Hyde

  MMm get enough money off people and you can do what you like, there were a lot of international camera crews filming and linking in to the bbc though

• Darren Anderson

  the crisp salesman guy wasn’t very good, was he?