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The Media Media Television The Internet

Olympics to Have Live Online Coverage, But Not For Americans 438

Posted by michael from the because-they-hate-you dept.
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*
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Olympics to Have Live Online Coverage, But Not For Americans More

Olympics to Have Live Online Coverage, But Not For Americans

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  • Live For Americans with Tivo (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stecoop ( 759508 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:36PM (#9903008) Journal
    Will the Ruling [slashdot.org] help Tivo owners across national boarders?

    • Re:Live For Americans with Tivo (Score:4, Informative)

      by dnoyeb ( 547705 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @07:47PM (#9904874) Homepage Journal
      Well this whole situation sucked 4 years ago. They are not even covering all events, and that means if they dont cover it, you CAN'T see it in USA.

      Its fucking annoying.

      I could not watch Tae Kwon Do last year because of this Bullshit.

      WTF are the olympics about, profit?

      Damn the IOC, and the money hearders.

      I dont have such friends in foreign countries, except perhaps Canada, and i just have to be lucky to see it on Canadian channels...

      ASS HOLES!

    • Re:Live For Americans with Tivo (Score:4, Informative)

      by roger_and_out ( 697323 ) on Saturday August 07, 2004 @03:51AM (#9907416)
      I really feel sorry for you Americans. It was my misfortune to be staying in NC during the '96 Olympic Games. After the luxury of the BBC's coverage, what I got to see from Atlanta was severely limited and very censored. I say censored because if a sport didn't have an American competing in it, or the American competitor was not doing well, THEN IT DIDN'T GET SHOWN.

      OK, so the BBC's output is heavily UK biased but that is understandable and expected. But,the BBC covered minority sports as well as the main ones. The coverage went out over two channels. There were hundreds of hours of LIVE coverage. (Almost ALL the US coverage was from tape and heavily edited.) How many of you from the US realise that there are eighteen hours a day of action from the games almost every day?

      Was I glad to get back to the UK for the last three days of competition? Oh yes!

  • I guess CNN didn't think it was newsworthy. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Chess_the_cat ( 653159 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:36PM (#9903009) Homepage
    They were right.

    • More likely NBC didn't want people to know.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Fallen Kell ( 165468 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @05:17PM (#9903521)
      Since they have their fingers into most news sites, they said, "Get that off the news!!! We don't want people to know this because someone will figure out a way around it."

      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.

  • This is what Open Proxies are for (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gorbachev ( 512743 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:36PM (#9903014) Homepage
    Just use an open proxy in Europe and you'll be wathing the games live as well.

    • Re:This is what Open Proxies are for (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Just use an open proxy in Europe and you'll be wathing the games live as well.

      Shhh, you're going to hurt NBC's feelings.

    • Re:This is what Open Proxies are for (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      This is not necessarily(sp?) true. First of all, a proxy cannot handle the requests for all the traffic (most likely , as most proxies are slow). Secondly, many irc servers and other sites nowadays can traceback through a proxy to detect the original ip of the client.

      I had a user who was banned and tried using proxies for IE and it still would not let him connect =)

      • Re:This is what Open Proxies are for (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        You banned a user from using IE. Man your hard core. Go lynx...

      • Re:This is what Open Proxies are for (Score:5, Informative)

        by gorbachev ( 512743 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:46PM (#9903154) Homepage
        That's why you check in advance whether the open proxy reveals the originating IP address or not.

        If the proxy is slow, use another one. I do it all the time.

        My home country's laws about alocohol advertising used to require advertisers to block all access to websites advertising alcoholic products produced in my country to the residents of the country. All foreigners could access the sites all they could. It really didn't take long to find an open proxy outside the borders to check out what was on the site (wasn't worth the effort).

        • Re:This is what Open Proxies are for (Score:4, Informative)

          by wfberg ( 24378 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:49PM (#9903199)
          That's why you check in advance whether the open proxy reveals the originating IP address or not.

          IRC servers check to see whether your connection is from an open proxy by connecting to it/portscanning; by definition IRC connections don't contain HTTP headers that reveal the originating IP address.

          • Re:This is what Open Proxies are for (Score:4, Funny)

            by gorbachev ( 512743 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:59PM (#9903325) Homepage
            I don't think they will be streaming the Olympics over an IRC server...

            • Re:This is what Open Proxies are for (Score:5, Interesting)

              by carpe_noctem ( 457178 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @06:57PM (#9904369) Homepage Journal
              You laugh, but I've done this before. The last time I did it was the first day of the Iraqi War (II)... I had to go to class, so I couldn't very well watch the news coverage, so I dropped on over to cnn.com's ircd, where an ircbot with a closed-captioning->text program streamed the news broadcasts. It was a pretty easy way to get the news when I didn't have access to multimedia internet....
    • Forget open - I'm lucky enough (in this case, at least) to work in the US for a Swedish company, so I should be able to view these just fine...
      • I used to work for a company that had proxy servers in all continents. The US proxies were configured to block just about everything, but not access to the other proxy servers. Kaching! :)

        Anytime I couldn't get to a site I needed to (at one point, they blocked every commerce site out there, including book stores I was using to buy books I needed for work), I would just point my browser to one of the foreign proxies.

        Worked for all the IM clients as well. US proxy blocked all IM traffic, the foreign ones di
    • Just use an open proxy in Europe and you'll be wathing the games live as well.

      Poor proxy... :-(
    • I was just thinking that. You read my mind.
    • How do you find an open proxy that's fast enough for streaming video? I can hardly find one that's fast enough to use the web comfortably.

    • No tape delay on CBC (Score:5, Informative)

      by KenAndCorey ( 581410 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @07:11PM (#9904517)
      CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) normally shows the Olympics [www.cbc.ca] without a delay. I know this television channel is often available in the United States, especially those near the Canadian border.

  • Should this be YRO? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ShortedOut ( 456658 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:38PM (#9903030) Journal
    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.

    • Re:Should this be YRO? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:42PM (#9903098) Homepage Journal
      "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?"

      Seeing as how they're paying the bills...

      • Re:Should this be YRO? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by wfberg ( 24378 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:57PM (#9903300)
        "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?"

        Seeing as how they're paying the bills...

        Well, if that's your attitude, don't come complaining about any perceived "conservative" or "liberal" bias in the media. Unless you're the advertiser paying said media to be biased the way you tell them to be, of course.

        • Re:Should this be YRO? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @05:05PM (#9903390) Homepage Journal
          "Well, if that's your attitude, don't come complaining about any perceived "conservative" or "liberal" bias in the media."

          I don't complain about it, though I both agree and disagree. I think you're right, but the whole point of news reporting is to be fair and unbiased.

          Money corrupts. Can't help that.

          • Re:Should this be YRO? (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Orne ( 144925 ) on Saturday August 07, 2004 @12:06AM (#9906573) Homepage
            I hate to be a cynic, but I think the whole point of news reporting is to attract your attention to those crucial 8 minutes every half hour... the commerical sponsors.

            What happens inbetween commercials only exists to get you to turn to their channel... after all thats why (1) products like TIVO scare the crap [marketingvox.com] out of them for its ability to hide commercials, and (2) product placement [howstuffworks.com] in the shows themselves allows commercial time to blend with content time. Hell, CBS was running programs [themediadrop.com] about books that the parent company published [thatliberalmedia.com], and calling it news... And after all, why are the news readers so pretty [go.com]... so you'll tune in [nakednews.com].

            This is also why I believe news reporters tend to become politically biased over time towards their local markets... it is their job to retain viewers/customers, and so you preach to your local markets. The political landscape [outsidethebeltway.com] is strongly correllated with urban concentrations, as are the "big" markets. The "old" big 3 broadcast media meets the needs of the cities, with its liberal leanings. Those living away from urban areas have to rely on cable and satelite, which "new" big media promptly cornered the market, and tilted their content towards their libertarian/conservative consumers. The people like like Jennings's leanings will tend to flip on ABC, and ABC gets viewers to watch its commercials, and those of the other leanings will flip on Fox, and Fox gets viewers for its commercials. Companies win, educating citizens loses.

      • Re:Should this be YRO? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by bigpat ( 158134 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @05:11PM (#9903470)
        "Seeing as how they're paying the bills..."

        Well, unless their burning capital, the customers are the ones really paying the bills.

        • Well, unless their burning capital, the customers are the ones really paying the bills.

          So basically, you're paying to the corporations so they can stop you from accessing the things you want without paying them more. And the same with your government (DMCA, and those anti-P2P laws we all know will pass sooner or later).

          I see Americans are honoring the heritage of robber barons :).

      • Yeah, sure, advertising companies are paying for sports events. Perheaps even for training of the sportsmen?

        Couple of years ago there was quite a scandal, when Polsat (commercial TV in Poland) absurdely expensive exclusive rights for FIFA World Cup and decided they will air the coverage only on their encrypted, subscription-only digital satelite platform. They imagined World Cup as a huge drive to sell subscriptions.

        Among the arguments why this is bad was one fact: in football (or should I say soccer?) ov
      • Seeing as how they're paying the bills...

        *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 give

    • Free press my ass.

      What? It's the video stream from a different country, not the US, not protected/regulated by any rules/laws/etc from our country. I'm sure there are are many broadcasts that we have had in the US that we have not necessarily shared with other countries. Almost sounds like it's cheap of our broadcasting companies to not pay into such coverage. This sounds like a stupid case of "poor us" for the US, when really, there are lots of other countries out there not getting this footage, let alo

    • Re:Should this be YRO? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Lawbeefaroni ( 246892 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:50PM (#9903211) Homepage
      It doesn't seem like "ad companies" are directly involved. NBC pays $700+ million and as part of the contract want exclusive rights to US broadcast. Being dumbasses, they think they can apply this to online broadcasts so they write that into the contract.

      Worldwide outlets that carry the Olympics then are bound in their contracts to honor the exclusivity of other contracts, including NBC's for the US. So they have to try to block access for US "viewers." Sure ad revenue is the reason for the exclusive contracts, but it's the networks and the IOC (or whoever sells the broadcast rights) that are trying to control internet access.

    • Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by rd_syringe ( 793064 )
      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.

  • MLB.com (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lukewarmfusion ( 726141 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:38PM (#9903036) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Re:MLB.com (Score:4, Funny)

      by lukewarmfusion ( 726141 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:40PM (#9903060) Homepage Journal
      Those preview and submit buttons are so close together. Now everyone thinks I can't even handle HTML.

      Where do I return my geek card?

      • Re:MLB.com (Score:5, Funny)

        by Finuvir ( 596566 ) <rparle.soylentred@net> on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:46PM (#9903142) Homepage

        Where do I return my geek card?

        You can give it--as well as all the other contents of your wallet--to me, the Wallet Inspector.

      • Re:MLB.com (Score:5, Interesting)

        by andyrut ( 300890 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @05:04PM (#9903376) Homepage Journal
        Now everyone thinks I can't even handle HTML.

        Nah, I just thought you were getting gradually more and more agitated in your post. I was waiting for the all caps to break out at any moment.

        I share in your disapproval of blackout restrictions for MLB.TV. If it's being broadcast on television, what difference does it make what medium I choose to watch it on?

        If I watch a game on FOX (which I can pick up on a TV antenna for FREE) or on my computer (a service which I pay for), I'm going to be seeing the exact same content - INCLUDING the commercials. What does FOX have to lose by having the game rebroadcast over the Internet?
    • Did they upgrade? Last year when I tried to get a game they blocked it based on the zip code of my credit card billing address. Which I found odd considering

      1)They had no problem charging my card for the game

      2)They advertise it as, watch on the road... limey bastards.
      • As I recall, there were plans to block based on the location of the IP source. Which puts my wife's parents, AOL users from Michigan, in Virginia.

        Awesome.

        The billing address zip code doesn't make sense, because of the reason you described. So their market is then pared down to those fans that live in areas outside of where the TV broadcasts hit. Which is likely a smaller number than they'd like. I'm guessing it's a losing venture for them. Maybe they're just willing to take a hit for a while and use it as

  • torrents? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sp00 ( 639381 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:38PM (#9903038)
    Can we expect to see these available for download with BT? Almost every other TV show is...

  • Say Hello to Mr Anonymous Proxy Server (Score:3, Funny)

    by Cryofan ( 194126 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:39PM (#9903045) Journal
    Stickin' it to The Man whenever and wherever possible!
  • This is dumb....not unexpected, but still dumb. Hmm...lessee....most of us woud still be at work for primetime events in Athens anyway and that would be perfect to drive the net admins batty with streaming packets!
  • Does anyone have an idea why the the links to the CNN website gives different variations of the classic 404 theme? Even if the trailing slash is stripped from the http://edition.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/08/05/ol ympics.online.ap [cnn.com] link, a plain object not found message is displayed.

  • Deep Throat said ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RWarrior(fobw) ( 448405 ) * on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:40PM (#9903057)
    "Follow the money."

    At least since Los Angeles in 1984 (which is as long as I've been following it), it hasn't been about sport or competition or peace.

    It's been about bribery, profits, and raking in the dough.

    So does any of this surprise us?

    • Re:Deep Throat said ... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Santana ( 103744 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:58PM (#9903305)

      It has always been so since the begining

      español [rd.com]

      English [rd-india.com]

      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

    • So does any of this surprise us?
      No but it should disgust us. US$793M for rights to broadcast seems a bit rediculous.

      However this has been the way it has always been. There is a nice artical in Smithsonian [si.edu]this month about how the ancient Greeks actually did it and there was pleanty of bribery, profits, and raking in the dough back then too.

  • It's all about the money... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:40PM (#9903061)
    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.
    • the numerous cases of doping discovered recently (in cycling, athletics, soccer,...).

      Doping has been big news in swimming. The Germans in the 1980s, the Chinese women in the 1990s, and then various random samplings of high-level atheletes that gained there status through the use of designer steroids and whiskey in their piss.
    • Not forgetting the insanely large amounts of money used to subsidise the construction of the olympic village.
    • I thought it was about the mind-numbing number of feel good stories about the atheletes and the endless droning on of commentators. Oh and throw in the tape delays and the restriction of some events to cable tv stations that not everybody has access to. It's made NBC and CBS coverage of the olympics become absolutely intolerable. I'll probably just watch the US men's basketball team struggle to medal just so I can get a laugh.

    • Y'know, British folks are paying for the BBC website through our (all-but-) mandatory TV license fee, I don't really see why this should be opened up to people in other countries.

      If you want TV without ads, move to the UK and pay your £116 (about $180 I guess) a year for it, otherwise stick with the service you get in the US, and don't expect the 60 million folks in the UK to pay for a service for 300 million folks in the US.

  • Work Around? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:41PM (#9903073)
    IIRC, icravetv.com used a zip code based system to identify their "legal" (canadian) users from their "illegal" (american) users. Type in a Canadian zip code and off you go.

    • Re:Work Around? (Score:3, Informative)

      by zx75 ( 304335 )
      First step towards doing so... Remember that Canadian addresses do not have zip codes!

      They are postal codes, and they are a completely different formatting than the US zip.

  • 1250 hours of coverage? I don't need the net. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by garcia ( 6573 ) * on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:43PM (#9903101)
    On top of that, U.S. viewers must verify their identity using a credit card from Visa - an NBC advertiser - though they will not be charged.

    Not a Visa cardholder? You're out of luck.

    Interesting but not surprising. I'm surprised you don't have to prove you were one of the 8% of the population that ate at McDonalds that day...

    Some European broadcasters are limiting video to high-speed, broadband customers only, seeking to keep foreigners from connecting via international phone calls.

    Oh fuck you, give me a break, no one is going to download Olympics video over dialup via an international call. It's just not worth it. Perhaps AmEx would love for you to pay for that call on their card?

    "Of course you get frustrated you can't do everything you want, but compared to four years ago, this is incredibly much better," said Kristian Elster, who works on the Web site for Norwegian broadcaster NRK.

    Maybe in Norway you can't see the shit on TV. NBC comes over the air here and you see a ton of stuff. Most of the really boring shit is on during the day and they play the important races at prime time (live or not). Watching video via the net doesn't impress me.

    Fans are the ultimate winners, Joerg said. Even with some 12,000 hours of total TV coverage across Europe, "you cannot cover all," he said. "Broadband and mobile technology can complement the traditional television coverage."

    No you can't and most of it sucks anyway. What's shown is generally the important/good stuff. At least in my experience. 1250 hours of coverage is a lot.
    • 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.

    • Re:1250 hours of coverage? I don't need the net. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rusty0101 ( 565565 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @05:22PM (#9903572) Homepage Journal
      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

  • Thieves and Liars (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bs_testability ( 784693 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:44PM (#9903122)
    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!
    • No, it's just a convergence of bipolar readers feeling the same way. Give them a few minutes, there'll be some flip-flopping.
    • flip flopping @ slashdot ??? no, never, surely you jest.*


      *note sarcasim here
  • And of course they'll only cover the "name" events or ones that we have a hope of winning. And they'll have a "LIVE" bug at the top of the screen, even though it will be tape-delayed by at least half a day.
  • of us Americans when I say, "That sucks."

  • Go slashdot! (Score:5, Funny)

    by glassware ( 195317 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:46PM (#9903144) Homepage Journal
    Alright slashdotters! You just solved Katie Jones' domain name dispute. Where are you going next? To the Olympic coverage problem!!!

  • I'll set up a TCP redirection process on my servers ;)

  • It indicates that content providers have to do a series of lookups to verify you are within their scope of coverage. Proxy detection is apparently in place (how good though is hard to say without testing).

    Still, the Olympics have been boring as hell since 84. Plus, considering the Balco (sp?) steroid scandal and how the USOC is reacting to it, it's hard to trust that the athletes aren't all hopped up anyhow.

  • proxies w/o PROXY_FOR support (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cjsteele ( 27556 ) * <coreyjsteele AT yahoo DOT com> on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:52PM (#9903237) Homepage
    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.
  • Can anyone at NBC say "ssh tunelling"? I would have thought it would be better to try to get people to watch your TV stations by providing a better service than the one transmitted down braodband (I cannot believe that is difficult) rather than trying to block out competition (which by using proxy servers would be easy to circumvent anyway). What happened to good old fashioned US cpaitalist competition?

  • Funny (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ttyp0 ( 33384 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:55PM (#9903278) Homepage
    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?

  • Your own fault for having that revolution (Score:5, Funny)

    by jellybear ( 96058 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @04:56PM (#9903284)
    Otherwise, maybe you could watching BBC live olympic coverage online too.

    • We [cia.gov] didn't have a revolution, but still have at least the promise of decent Olympics coverage [www.cbc.ca]. That's the theory, anyway: the last couple of times have been dominated by talking heads, cutesy "background" spots (especially the Sydney Olympics), and general chatter about almost everything but sports.

      They also had a nasty habit of telling us that Canadians placed 5th, 10th and 21st, but never told who actually won.

      ...laura

      • And NBC didn't do the same? One of the few times I made the mistake of watching NBC I caught the triathlon. They spent the whole time on the Americans who were well back from the lead. They didn't even show or discuss the medal winners.

        Those in glass houses shouldn't throw stones...

  • This is really scary... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by The Breeze ( 140484 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @05:05PM (#9903394) Homepage
    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.

  • Here is what I don't understand (Score:4, Interesting)

    by geek ( 5680 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @05:08PM (#9903427)
    Isn't tax payer money going to support our USA teams? If so I think we have a basic right to see them perform.

    I'm a little upset that the olympics is now becoming a pay per view type event with exclusive deals to big companies to distribute. This was once an event that unified the world in healthy competition, all in good fun. Now it's gone corporate and is gouging people.

    I'll admit I could care less about a lot of the events, but that's possibly just because I never get to see them and appreciate them. As it is, I never know what events are going on or when. The athletes I don't know by name etc etc.

    The olympics IMHO has a PR problem. They are failing to reach younger folks who would normally be the ones to care about this and are therefore losing ground to the X Games and similar events. I don't even know anyone these days that gives a shit about the olympics. Most people I talk to about it just shrug and forget it.

  • Off Shore Proxies (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @05:09PM (#9903437) Homepage Journal
    Ok, so we just bounce off somewhere overseas and it wont know the difference..

    They do this now with races, they black out the local area and penalize the locals that dont get to go... but let everyone else in the world see what is happening..

  • Hooray! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by payndz ( 589033 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @05:14PM (#9903486)
    1: I'm in the UK, so I can watch live streaming of the Olympics if I want!
    2: I think the Olympics are a tedious pile of shite, so I don't have to!

    (Wait, that means the BBC has blown an ungodly amount of money on something I have no interest in, and it'll be sport, sport, sport all summer long... So, actually, no changes there. Carry on!)

  • You have to be kidding me (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ALeavitt ( 636946 ) <aleavitt@@@gmail...com> on Friday August 06, 2004 @05:17PM (#9903515)
    The Olympics have always been broadcast in the US with substandard coverage and a ridiculously low useful-programming-to-commercials ratio. Want to watch an actual long-distance track event? You're SOL. Want to see an event before hearing the results? If it's deemed ratings-worthy, you'll have to wait for prime time. And why? So that execs can line their pockets with ad revenue. There is no freedom of the press because corporations run the country. When are consumers going to stand up and say that they've had enough of this? It's ridiculous! Seriously, watch a taped broadcast of anything from 10 years ago. There are less commercials per break, and less commercial breaks per show. We're getting less and less while networks make more and more, and why? Because no one does anything about it! Now NBC has a monopoly on Olympic coverage in the US and they're actively preventing anyone from circumventing the monopoly. I don't know about anyone else, but I, for one, will be streaming Olympic coverage as much as possible, even if I'm not watching it, as a sort of silent protest.

  • In other news.. clothing bans, blog bans, Google (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Animaether ( 411575 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @05:46PM (#9903809) Journal
    In other news...
    The Olympic Games are off-limits to those wearing clothing clearly sporting logos or slogans of companies who are direct competitors of companies sponsoring The Olympic Games.
    This is a measure mostly aimed towards preventing a group of people wearing shirts that would spell out a company name which would be clearly visible in any televised broadcast, but e.g. a cap sporting Pepsi, when Coca~Cola is the sponsor, would be forbidden as well. Or vice-versa, can't say I care which one's sponsoring ;)

    In additional news, athletes are once again told not to write about the olympics online. This is the same measure taken last time around in Australia - though not enforced too strictly.

    And in entirely unrelated news, but on a level of "Boohoo - us poor Americans"
    Boohoo, us poor rest-of-the-worlders - we can't bid on Google IPO stock :)
    Global company - global search engine - Americans First (Only?) ;)

  • I don't watch the Olympics anyway (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JimLynch ( 684194 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @05:56PM (#9903884) Homepage
    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.

  • Is this really a big deal? (Score:3, Informative)

    by eskwayrd ( 575069 ) on Friday August 06, 2004 @06:09PM (#9903976)
    'live' means while it happens. The bulk of Olympic events will take place during daylight hours in Greece. That's middle of the night in North America.

    Folks who work regular hours, have families, etc. will only be able to appreciate video from the Olympics well after the events are over.

    Unless I'm missing something, those folks outnumber night shift workers, kids with nothing better to do, and (gasp) geeks who decide not to visit the 'big room' because it's too bright. And by a wide margin.

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