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?
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.
Can we expect to see these available for download with BT? Almost every other TV show is...
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 just in, I-90 has been slashdotted!
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
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"
Otherwise, maybe you could watching BBC live olympic coverage online too.
It has always been so since the begining
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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
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
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.
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!
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.
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.