Olympics to Have Live Online Coverage, But Not For Americans 438
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*
Should this be YRO? (Score:5, Insightful)
These ad guys go to far, and, of course, the media will cover up stuff like that. Free press my ass.
MLB.com (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
It's all about the money... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Should this be YRO? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seeing as how they're paying the bills...
Thieves and Liars (Score:4, Insightful)
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!
Re:Should this be YRO? (Score:2, Insightful)
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 alone ANY footage of the games.
Funny (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Should this be YRO? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
This is really scary... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Then you mention "free press" which is irrelevant, because this isn't the government suppressing anything.
Re:1250 hours of coverage? I don't need the net. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
More likely NBC didn't want people to know.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:1250 hours of coverage? I don't need the net. (Score:5, Insightful)
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
What you think you have rights to (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't that our airwaves use to broadcast television?
Re:This is really scary... (Score:1, Insightful)
I would hope they'd pull the story in that situation.
Much ado about nothing. (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't watch the Olympics anyway (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is what Open Proxies are for (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is how it was untill things got so out of hand financially that there was a simple choice between commercializing it or not having it happen at all.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with your sentiment, but who is going to pay the bill?
Re:Should this be YRO? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I pay the bills, and don't want them mucking it up (Score:3, Insightful)
*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 given the chance to shove ads down the world's throat.