First, they had the footy on until about five minutes before the ceremony started. No build-up, no pre-promotion, no nothing. Sure, you have to keep your footy audience happy (I guess) but given that the Olympics is a relatively rare event I would have thought some more coverage would be in order.
Which brings me to my second point. With a pre-show Channel 7 could have shown ads during that instead of wasting about 2-3 minutes before the ceremony started promoting the 'broadcast sponsors' and stopping the broadcast of the ceremony every few minutes for ad breaks. It really ruined the atmosphere and meant that a few things (like the fireworks and a few bits of the show) were missed.
I did notice, however, that there were no ad breaks during the athlete's walk into the stadium. Or at least none that I noticed - I wandered off in the middle. Unusual, given that this went on for a few hours.
Also, the commentary disappeared for a few minutes to be replaced by the sound of technicians trying to get the commentary back online. Not that this was such a bad thing, because...
The commentary was nearly useless. It was filled with sexist remarks about various female athletes; had pointless comments about parts of the ceremony (like how paper could be used for writing or drawing on - really? I had no idea...); and they failed to explain for the first ten minutes of the athlete's walk in why they were entering the stadium in such an unusual (for a westerner) order. It turns out the order of the countries was dictated by how many movements it took to represent the country's name in Chinese script. This was about the only thing useful thing said in the entire broadcast.
Overall, this has reinforced my ongoing belief that the Channel 7 commentary team needs a complete overhaul. They are tired, monotonous and boring. And on top of that, it appears that Channel 7 has spent all their money buying the rights to the broadcast and none on quality production values.