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*
Will the Ruling help Tivo owners across national boarders?
Can we expect to see these available for download with BT? Almost every other TV show is...
so, what's to stop a high-speed provider in the UK from setting up a squid proxy with the "forwarded_for off" line in the config? I mean, come on, really this is utterly retarded.
"This above all, to thine own self be true"
This is slashdot. \. is Liberal, it leans to the left.
Slashdot is anything but liberal, as you'd know if you ever read any of the gun control arguments that seem to break out in completely unrelated threads.
Slashdot users are generally libertarian. Which is a completely different thing from "liberal". Libertarians believe government has no place whatsoever in their lives, which is why you get stories like Google's mismanagement of their IPO listed under the "your rights online" tag. This is pretty much the exact opposite of what liberals believe. If anything, libertarians lean a lot more towards the conserative side, since both supposedly believe in smaller government (though in practice, most so-called "conservatives" only believe in smaller government in areas where it suits them - not, for example, in a smaller military or in cuts to social security).
Now, I am not a libertarian, I am a liberal (and btw, we liberals have nothing against big business, just big business that breaks the law, ie. Microsoft or Enron). Obviously, not all Slashdot users are the same. But the general gist of things here is usually that all government meddling in technology is bad, which explains the calls of "censorship" in this thread (even though government is not even involved) or the complaints about "rights" being infringed (as if watching TV is a "right", which implies that it's either something you're born with [as in an "inalienable" right] or it's something written into law, or both). As a liberal, I often feel extremely out of place here in actually not always arguing against government regulation of various things if it makes sense - I evaluate everything on a case by case basis. But what business does, as long as they're not breaking any laws, is business.
I personally think this whole Olympics thing is pretty damn stupid from a business standpoint, and not at all helpful to the Olympics as a whole (interest in the Olympics in the US has been dropping since the 1980's, partly because of the shoddy live TV coverage). But my "rights" are not being trampled on here; just the long-term viability of the Olympics themselves. Once these games are over, I expect to once again see a lot of bitching about the poor TV coverage, a lot of bitching by NBC about the low ratings and a lot of bitching by the Olympic committee about the lack of interest. If you ask me, none of them have anybody to blame but themselves.