Slashdot Mirror
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*
Should we let Ad companies dictate not only what we can or cannot see on televison, but what we can, or cannot access via Interent?
These ad guys go to far, and, of course, the media will cover up stuff like that. Free press my ass.
MLB.com does this for their game broadcasts too. I'd gladly pay for a subscription so I could watch the game when I'm at work or on the road.
The point of watching it on the web is that I don't have a TV available, so I'm willing to put up with the crappy quality, high bandwidth, etc. of an Internet broadcast.
If I had a TV, I'd watch that instead. Blackouts are meant to help ticket sales, or to push people into watching the TV station that's paying for the rights. But if TV isn't an option, then I go for radio or internet.
Where's the time that the Olympics were about sport. Now it's all about money. Look at the corruption scandal which was brought out by BBC, the numerous cases of doping discovered recently (in cycling, athletics, soccer,...). And now this, people cannot even have Free access to images about the event, just because some people again want to get more money out of it. It's sad.
Wow.
Usually I support the pirates and get pretty beat up around here.
Now I'm looking at a full page of posts detailing how to infringe on these distribution rights.
Is this a major flip-flop or are these posters different from the usual crowd around here?
stick it to the man!
free the bits!
This is the first time I've ever considered using a proxy outside the US to view content. Isn't usually the other way around?
And no, I'm not talking about the Olympic story.
Since when does a CNN story VANISH?
I hate to put on the tinfoil hat, but CNN is a division of Time/Warner, one of the monstrously-huge media entities trying to get so-called "intellectual property" the same status as "real estate" - they want a piece of "intellectual property" to be eternal, like land, where it can be kept - and milked - forever, without any expiration.
They clearly want to profit forever off all works that are created, and they want to use technology to do it, and they want to force the use of technology through legal means. In short, they want to sell you a license to think.
Now, let's look at CNN: this is a gigantic news organization that is the main source of news for millions of Americans that seems to have yanked a relatively innoculous story about "intellectual property."
I've heard of CNN changing stories, and moving them, but I've never seen once totally removed - and a search of CNN for keywords in the original AP article finds nothing.
It is very clear that the MPAA, RIAA and other gigantic entities that want much more restrictive laws on copyright and viewing licenses would prefer to have these laws passed without reference to the American public.
They don't want people to know what they are doing until it is done.
Now, we have a relatively tame story about Olympics, but just interesting enough to perhaps make Joe Six-Pack think for a moment, "Hey, why to those Frogs and Brits get to see stuff that I have to pay for?"
Is it possible that this is why the story was removed?
Could CNN be filtering news that could irritate the American masses into seeing that the Fair Use Doctrine, Limited Copyrights and a cornucopia of other rights currently enjoyed by Americans are slipping away?
That scares me.
You don't have rights to see anything on television. It's a privilege, a service provided by private companies.
Then you mention "free press" which is irrelevant, because this isn't the government suppressing anything.
What you think sucks is probably what I want to watch.
I don't give a damn about track and field, but just TRY to watch a reasonable amount of coverage for cycling.
Same with the winter olympics. They should change it to the "Figure Skating and Snow Skiing World Championships", because that's all you ever see. More bobsled. More luge. More biathlon.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I mean seriously, all you need is another geek in another country to put up a proxy server on a high speed connection and we have video. Or just stream it on-line themselves with some of the P2P streams out there.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
It's been my observation that of the 1250 hours of broadcast Olympic 'coverage' that the average US citizen has available to them during the Olympics, less than 10% of that time is actual event coverage.
I will grant that I really do not want to see each elimination heat of the 1600 meter relay. I suspect that watching a bunch of guys and galls standing and shooting at targets for hours at a time would probably get old as well. (For a lot of people anyway.)
What gets really old for me however is watching 2 hours of interviews, "background" material, someone pacing an athlete during his or her training in the years before while some narrator discloses how this athlete fought tooth and nail from some long ago disaster. All leading up to a 10 minute tape delayed presentation of the athlete finishing whatever event he or she was a part of, with a 5 minute tape delayed award ceremony with the (you probably never heard of this person more than 3 hours ago) now celebrity athlete being one of the three medalion winners (or part of one of the teams on the stairs.)
Of course that two hours of 'history' is part of four hours of time, the other half of the time being spent providing ad space for the Olympic sponsors. After the half hour spent for the "main event" (10 min of event, 5 min of Awards, 15 min of ads) you might get part of a half hour to wrapup that 'highlights' some of the other events that happened that day, mostly to explain how whichever US athlete was in the event did that day. (But only if they came in close to or as a medalist, and only if whatever producer happens to be running the show that night thinks the event might interest someone with his or her own narrow view of what the Olympics should be.)
1250 'hours' of 'coverage' is probably Wonderful TV, but what the US population sees is hardly coverage of the Olympics.
Then again, that's my opinion.
-Rusty
You never know...
Isn't that our airwaves use to broadcast television?
Looks good for your age..
Athens is 8 hours ahead of the central united states so unless you intend on watching the prime time events at around 2 am stop bitching about the live webcasts.
Why bother watching it in the first place? It's become so commercial that the athletic spirit it's supposed to embody seems to have been lost to an orgy of advertising and product endorsements (for the people who win the medals). Thanks but no thanks. I'd rather play UT 2004 than sit through the olypics.
Jim Lynch
Tech Analyst and Community Manager
> It's the freaking Olympics! No wonder it's declining in popularity if the Olympics Authorities are so clearly manipulating the Olympics in a for-profit environment like this; the Olympics are supposed to be more of a public institution than a privatized highly restricted event.
Which is how it was untill things got so out of hand financially that there was a simple choice between commercializing it or not having it happen at all.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with your sentiment, but who is going to pay the bill?
*I* pay the bills, monthly through my cable channel. If that's not enough to support the networks, I'd vastly prefer that they cut out ads and increase prices, giving me the option to simply pay or go without. That the ad companies hand money to the networks does not give them the moral high ground; they're not doing us any favors, they're leeching off of society. The advertisers vastly prefer the status quo, and are terrified of the day when they won't be given the chance to shove ads down the world's throat.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.