Following a pattern set by previous tournaments, the NHK sumo crew is broadcasting live for both Day 14 and Day 15. This maps out to Saturday and Sunday afternoon in Japan, starting around 5:00 PM Japan time. The broadcast typically starts just after the top of the hour news break, so it will be 50 to 55 minutes of live sumo, with an ensemble cast of commentators including Murray Johnson and John Gunning.
During prior live broadcasts, Tachiai has live-blogged the matches. We are working out the logistics of covering two nights of sumo and staying sane.
Grand Sumo Live Times
04:00 AM Eastern (US)
03:00 AM Central (US)
02:00 AM Mountain (US)
01:00 AM Pacific (US)
09:00 AM UK
10:00 AM Europe
Sorry, I can’t quite wrap my head around this. Sumo will be live at 0400 ET. Got it. But which day is that, ET? Saturday in Japan at 1700 would be 0400 ET in US, but would it be Saturday or Sunday here? So, if I can get up that early, do I watch on Saturday & Sunday or Sunday & Monday?
Pick a day. When it’s 17:00 in Japan, it’s 04:00 in New York. So that works for early Saturday, and early Sunday.
It will be 04:00 Saturday & Sunday for us in EDT.
Thanks, everyone!
Already set my DVR to record. :-) :-)
The times given for the US are DST, in case anyone’s confused. (I checked by entering the events into my iCal and setting the time zone to JST, and it automatically converts it to local time.)
Japan time is ahead of the US. I live stream NHK and just looked at the daily schedule.
Saturday is my birthday so my gift is getting up at 1am pdt to watch King Tadpole take all the marbles! ;-)
NHK live coverage for Day 14 certainly has a lot to improved on.
I mean, why bother having a live broadcast if you are going to cut off all the pre-bout rituals that the rikishis is going through on the dohyo? Do they assume that the viewers tuning in on NHK World Japan live won’t be interested in those rituals? Or is this the standard coverage even in Japan?
I understand the spotlight on the yusho leader but why would I tune in to a sumo live telecast for shots of the (I think) Nagoya castle. Yes it’s a lovely castle but that’s not why I tuned in to the live coverage for.
The commentaries were outstanding though.
I don’t have a DVR so I got uo at 0400. And then I fell asleep during the extended Nagoya Castle views.!
So the video is the NHK G feed that gets bounced to Tokyo where the crew sit in a tiny booth and talk about it. That audio gets merged into the SAP channel for domestic and satellite broadcast. It also gets funneled (in this instance) to the stream servers for IP broadcast.
So you are seeing what the folks in Japan see, with some English language commentary added for our benefit. Yes. It’s annoying there is not a lot of “atmospherics” during the broadcast, but that’s for big NHK (Japan) to decide.