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

Should this be YRO?

[ShortedOut]

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.

It's all about the money...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

This is really scary...

[The Breeze]

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.

Re:1250 hours of coverage? I don't need the net.

[Moofie]

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.