“Nothing brings America together for two weeks like the Olympics, and that communal experience will now be shared across the country at the same time both on television and streaming online,” Jim Bell, the president of NBC Olympics production and programming, said in a statement. “That means social media won’t be ahead of the action in any time zone, and as a result, none of our viewers will have to wait for anything.”

NBC said its “primetime” coverage, which begins on the East Coast at 8 p.m., will begin at 7 p.m., 6 p.m. and 5 p.m., in the Central, Mountain and Pacific time zones, respectively.

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This move, the network said, should eliminate much of the worry about spoilers, including for many of the most popular events like Alpine skiing, figure skating and snowboarding, which are slated to air during prime time.

“We’re streaming it live, and social media has become so ubiquitous that hard to ignore even for people who are trying to avoid it,” Bell told the Los Angeles Times. “It just seemed like it was the right time to take this step.”

The move comes as an about-face to the network’s approach to the games last summer that saw programming concentrate less on the results and more on the event’s underlying narratives.

According to the network’s chief marketing officer, John Miller, the reasoning for that was because, “The people who watch the Olympics are not particularly sports fans.”

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“More women watch the games than men, and for the women, they’re less interested in the result and more interested in the journey,” Miller told Philly.com last year. “It’s sort of like the ultimate reality show and miniseries wrapped into one.”

This theory did not sit well with many, including Post columnist Sally Jenkins, who said the approach to repackage material to air on a delay “insults viewers, and the athletes themselves. … especially female athletes.”

“The Olympics is the most prominent competition in the world and 53 percent of Team USA is female, which means American women likely will bring in more medals than American men. Yet they will be presented in packaging aimed at a Ladies’ Home Journal crowd,” Jenkins wrote last year. “Exactly how does that grow a hardcore audience for women’s sports, or a year-in, year-out base for other Olympic sports, for that matter?”

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NBC didn’t help themselves with their “Ladies’ Home Journal” approach either. NBC’s audience for the Rio Olympics shrank by 18 percent when compared with the 2012 Olympics in London, according to the Times.

Part of the decrease can be explained because many viewers ditched their televisions and turned to online streaming to watch the action live. That is the part of the audience NBC’s new initiative appears to want to lure back.

“Live television is the backbone of linear TV — sports in particular and the Olympics at the top of that list,” Bell told the Times.