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Net Still Not At Olympics
angkor writes "It's two years later and the net is still largely shut out of the Olympics It seems like we were talking about this in relation to the last Olympics yesterday."
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I would agree, but I can only see two reasons why they don't want to do this..
1. They seem to like exclusive area licenses. (why go exclusive?? You can get more money out of two groups non-exclusive, I'd think, but I know people will pay good money for exclusive licensing..) As the article said (or perhaps another article), they're testing this year with the Swiss to see if they can geographically limit the access.
2. The costs. How much bandwidth would they eat up?? Gobs. And heaven knows that it already costs the IOC a fortune to run the Olympics, and they likely wouldn't be able to recoop all of the costs on something like this. While the host city pays for a lot of this stuff, I imagine eventually they'd draw the line.. Kinda like the $300 some million dollar opening ceremonies.
Personally, I don't want to see live streaming. I want to see archived streaming. Two events at the same time that you're interested in really sucks, and typically that means the network's gonna cover a third event you don't give a damn about.
Just my ideas, but I realize they may be inherently flawed.
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We don't need no Net Explorer We don't need no Thought control
One of the main reasons for not allowing the Olympics on the net this time around is due to the fees and costs that the IOC or whoever owns the telecast of the Olympics charges. Think about it... why would someone in the Eastern Hemisphere (aside from families, friends, etc. of the athletes) want to watch a rebroadcast of an Olympic event many hours later of someone from their country loosing (and if the athlete won, I'm sure they'd want to see the broadcast) if they can get the results minutes after it actually happens? Very few people would turn to the actual rebroadcast then.
Being that I live on the extreme South Texas border with Mexico, we actually have Mexican television stations along on our cable system. And during the Olympic Opening Ceremonies, there was at least 2 of the 5 Mexican stations available broadcasting the cerimonies (one in its actual entirety).
For those U.S. viewers who watched the ceremonies on N.B.C., you actually missed quite a bit during commercial interruptions. Did you even know that other groups actually performed? The Dixie Chics being one of the more recognizable names.
--OptipleX02
Actually, that's not really true, especially with regard to conflict between states. The idea that wars stopped for the ancient games is shown by historian Harvey Abrams by to be a modern misunderstanding.