I have been watching the coverage of the TC/UC and although improvements can be made with the telecast, I encourage all badminton fans out there to email Star Sports and let them know we are watching! let us show them how the badminton community is growing so that future tournaments would also be covered.
I would also encourage all badmintion fans who watch it on STAR TV to write to them to tell the commentators to srtop insulting the Asian players. These people have been pronouncing the names of Asian players TOTALLY wrong. As broadcasting professionals I would have imagined that the first thing they must learn is to address a person correctly. This means stop calling Taulfik Hidayat as Taulfik "He-day-yat", Wong Choon Hann as Wong Choon "Hand", Lin Dan as Lin "Dant" etc etc. The worst insult to a person is to address him/her incorrectly, esp in public.
I think "insulting" Asian Players is too heavy a term to use. If the commentators are Europeans, I wouldn't expect them to pronounce Asian names correctly. Can you say a Danish name properly? I'm Asian btw and I don't have any inclination whatsoever toward European commentators.
Commentators Frankly I think Gillian Clark really isn't that bad. It's about the closest you can get to the actual pronunciation of the Asian names by a European. You definitely can't expect them to say it like the natives do. If you were to complain about the pronunciation of players' names, you should have watched the telecast of the Japan Open on SuperSports. Goodness. During the MS Finals, the commentator pronounced Xia Xuanze's name in at least 4 differents ways, from something that sounded more or less like it, to 'Sia Shuanzee', to 'Sia Chuanjay', and finally he settled on 'Chia', which is quite off. Haha, I was quite amused.
I agree that it's hard to pronoun Asian's name for European. But they are professional commentators. Part of their jobs is to find out the correct pronunciation of the players. I don't think it's an insult, but I agree they are not doing their jobs. Look at NBC broadcasting Olympics, when they pronouned the Chinese names, most of the time they got it correct. And I learned that later the NBC commentators did spend a lot of time learning the pronunciation of the names. And there are only 14 names to learn in a TC or UC match.
to answer lclazaro. i actually DO NOT recommend us doing that. this streaming i believe isn't run by StarSports, as i see no link from the StarSports website to the streaming server. my guess is that the streaming was done by a 3rd party, and may or may not be authorized by Star. and unlikely as Star may not be getting any revenue from it. surely, the streaming server isn't getting any advertising revenue either.
in reply to kwun's post, i am not talking about the stream on the net but the tv telecast on Star Sports. thanks.