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US Viewers Using Proxies To Watch BBC Olympic Coverage
DavidGilbert99 writes "NBC is the sole broadcaster of the London 2012 Olympics in the U.S., having paid $1.1bn for the privilege. While NBC is providing live streaming through its website, you need to have a valid cable subscription in order to view the events. This has seen many tech savvy U.S. viewers turning to proxy servers to view the BBC's Olympic coverage, which doesn't need any sign-in to view — once your IP address looks like it is coming from the UK. One provider of VPN services has seen a ten-fold increase in new customers signing up for their services since last Friday."
Great. Here comes another amendment to the DMCA. The "Protect Our Networks, Mom, and Apple Pie--And I Support The Colorado Shooting Victims Act of 2013" which will make it illegal to circumvent the licensing agreements of your local network affiliates and outlaw all VPN's that refuse to turn over all server and user data to the FBI and NSA. And it will sail through Congress, and be signed immediately by President Obama--who will say to liberal supporters that he really doesn't WANT to sign it, but is doing so anyway.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
If NBC is a broadcast network, why do you need a cable subscription to watch online anyway? I mean other than the obvious that NBC is now owned by a cable company...
As a Canadian, it's fun to watch the Americans finally have to struggle to find content. We've been forced to use proxies for years.
To be blunt, the Olympic organisation needs to step up in its bid process to make sure that not only is it about getting money in to work within the machinery of an Olympics, but that any partner, and in particular its broadcast partners behave with minimum standards. These would be max advert time per hour, and min coverage required.
Any broadcasters who paster the coverage with advert time and clearly ruin the spectable could be eliminated. Any that don't plan to cover enough get the chop and so on. It should not merely be about the money.
I'm not a fan of the BBC. But its coverage of this Olympics has been stellar, and I can watch any - and all events. No coverage has ever been this vast or all encompassing.
We`re all equal
I watched the Olympics a bit last night when I visited my father, I was pretty heavily annoyed with the coverage.
With constant focus on pouty teens and their families, i was half convinced I was watching some new drama show.
If I want to know more about the athletes themselves, I'd watch the news. Please just stay focused on the performances. |:
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
In my opinion, NBC hasn't gotten nearly enough shit over their treatment of the opening ceremony. Constant chattering, inane commentary, and the absolutely insulting audacity to cut to commercial during the 7/7 London Bombing memorial.
The coverage of the games themselves hasn't been too great, either. I'm not going to bitch about a tape delay because that's just a fact of life when the games are 7 hours ahead of local time. But when results are spoiled by fucking promotional commercials just minutes ahead of the event in question, that's just incompetence.
So, screw NBC. I hope someday the BBC allows foreigners to pay for access to its content without having to do VPN hacks. I know I'd subscribe in a heartbeat (hello, Doctor Who Series 7).
With the balkanization of #London2012 and other worldwide events, the web is being turned into TV 2.0 by the content cartels. Originally one of the beautiful things about the web was that content was open to all. Someone from Mozambique had access to all the same data and resources as someone from USA or France. But increasingly, everything is becoming locked down and controlled for the benefit of the big media companies. Only through illegal means most don't even know about can this be circumvented, so a few tech savy people manage, but the vast majority do not.
Who is to blame for this? Well, sure, those media companies, but all of the web users are to blame. As long as we support this balkanization, it will continue to happen. As long as we are tuning into their content en mass, they will never stop this. The end game is TV 2.0, rather than the open and free internet we COULD have had. If we let this happen, it's our own fault.
Plus it would be nice to have coverage that wasn't oriented toward idiots.
It started before the opening ceremonies, with the NBC presenters delivering what sounded like drug-addled, free association platitudes over a montage of US athletes. It went on through the parade of nations when one of NBC's presenters gave us a fat dose of his personal political opinions. It was not so much that the leadership of those countries he targeted wasn't contemptible, as that I don't need a sports announcer to tell me what to think. It goes on through interview after interview where the idiot interviewers ask "how does it feel to win" and try to pump as much emotion out of the athletes as possible. Discuss how the event went, or cut to a sport you're not covering, for Pete's sake.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It's outrageous enough that you need to be a subscriber of their services and partner companies to watch anything online. But then they mislead you all the way in. They advertise it on tv and online make it seem like all you need to do is click on a feed and start watching. So despite having logins for three of their services I couldn't watch with any because I didn't have one of their crappy cable networks as part of those packages.
And to add insult to injury, coverage on NBC has been abysmal. Take last night's broadcast of women's gymnastics. There was no rhyme or reason to it. They showed a bunch of random events, several times not even waiting to show scores. They barely showed any of the competition, so who the hell knows why China ended up being so far behind, for example. They wasted too much time with goofy drama. And despite being so overly America centric, for whatever reason they spent the first hour in primetime broadcasting diving which featured no American even close to being in medal contention. And, last but not least, let's not forget the endless commercial interruptions.
It's pathetic and my interest in following the Olympics for anything to other than medal counts is quickly evaporating. NBC seems incapable of handling a broadcast of this scale. You'd think that for prerecorded broadcasts, with the massive staff devoted to the games that they'd do a better job of editing.