NBC Won't Live Stream The Olympics Opening Ceremony, Will Broadcast It On An 8-Hour Tape Delay

NBC will not offer a way for American viewers to watch the 2014 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony live.

In an interview with Variety, NBC Sports Group chairman Mark Lazarus said that the Opening Ceremony will not be live streamed on NBCOlympics.com. Instead, it will be broadcast on NBC at 7:30 p.m. eastern time - eight and a half hours after it happens in Sochi.

"We want to put context to it, with the full pageantry it deserves," he said.

Sochi is nine hours ahead of New York City. The Opening Ceremony will start at 11 a.m. on the east coast in the U.S., and 8 a.m. on the west coast.

There's no official way to watch it live.

NBC has taken heavily criticism in recent years for tape-delaying major medal events - refusing to show the sports people want to see live, and then pretending they hadn't happened yet during the evening broadcast.

But with the exception of the Opening Ceremony, they've backed off that stance this year. High-profile events like figure skating will be broadcast live on NBC Sports Network (a cable channel), and then the juicy parts will be repackaged from the traditional tape-delayed evening broadcast on NBC.