RIo Olympics Opening Ceremony: When Do They Start?

The Opening Ceremony for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics will take place Friday, Aug. 5 and air on NBC at 7:30 pm ET.

NBC Will Air Rio Olympics Opening Ceremony At 7:30 pm ET

For all the east coast viewers out there hoping to tune in live, the festivities at Rio’s Maracanã Stadium will be on a one-hour tape delay. Viewers out west will have to wait even longer, specifically four hours. Those on Mountain Time will have a two-hour delay. Such is the tragedy of time zones.

Brazil is only one hour ahead of the Eastern time zone. The ceremony will commence at 7 pm, but NBC won’t start coverage until an hour later. The choice to delay coverage by an hour is so that producers can curate some context of Rio and Brazilian culture for viewers tuning in.

In press event to promote the coverage, NBC said, “We think it’s important that we are able to put that into context for the viewer.”

Rio’s budget for the kick off to the Games of the XXXI Olympiad is ten percent less than the budget London worked with in 2012. Fernando Meirelles, one of the directors of the ceremonies, said in an interview with Bloomberg, “I guess I’d be ashamed to waste what London spent in a country where we need sanitation, where education needs money… So I’m very glad we are not spending money like crazy.”

The city has come under fire, however, for doing just that — allocating more money towards the games than social investments and displacing local communities.