Olympics to Have Live Online Coverage, But Not For Americans

Rytsarsky writes "According to this AP story (mirror), live video from the Olympics will be viewable online. However, 'the footage will be highly restricted to protect lucrative broadcast contracts, which are sold by territory - $793 million paid by NBC alone. Web sites must employ technology to block viewers from outside their home countries, so U.S. Web surfers won't benefit from the BBC's live coverage. They'll have to settle for highlights posted after NBC broadcasts, which are already largely tape-delayed.'" Interestingly, this AP wire story was picked up by CNN.com (it was at this URL and this URL), ran for a few hours, and now has been removed - I guess CNN didn't think it was newsworthy. *shrug*

Comments

Re:This is what Open Proxies are for

[gorbachev]

That's why you check in advance whether the open proxy reveals the originating IP address or not.

If the proxy is slow, use another one. I do it all the time.

My home country's laws about alocohol advertising used to require advertisers to block all access to websites advertising alcoholic products produced in my country to the residents of the country. All foreigners could access the sites all they could. It really didn't take long to find an open proxy outside the borders to check out what was on the site (wasn't worth the effort).

Re:Deep Throat said ...

[Santana]

It has always been so since the begining

español

English

All the myths around Olympics ("to win is not important", "amateurs only", "the torch", "the olympic spirit") was invented by Pierre de Coubertin who founded the modern Olympic Games

No tape delay on CBC

[KenAndCorey]

CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) normally shows the Olympics without a delay. I know this television channel is often available in the United States, especially those near the Canadian border.

Re:Live For Americans with Tivo

[roger_and_out]

I really feel sorry for you Americans. It was my misfortune to be staying in NC during the '96 Olympic Games. After the luxury of the BBC's coverage, what I got to see from Atlanta was severely limited and very censored. I say censored because if a sport didn't have an American competing in it, or the American competitor was not doing well, THEN IT DIDN'T GET SHOWN.

OK, so the BBC's output is heavily UK biased but that is understandable and expected. But,the BBC covered minority sports as well as the main ones. The coverage went out over two channels. There were hundreds of hours of LIVE coverage. (Almost ALL the US coverage was from tape and heavily edited.) How many of you from the US realise that there are eighteen hours a day of action from the games almost every day?

Was I glad to get back to the UK for the last three days of competition? Oh yes!