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No Streams for You! 15

Posted by michael from the no-surprises-here dept.
lim-bim-tim-wim writes "IDG NZ and others are reporting that NBC are determined to be the sole place to obtain streaming video of the Olympics. It appears NBC wants to save the good stuff for American prime time. This is despite local media paying billions for the television rights and time differences between prime times in different countries. Does this seem kinda like the TiVO thing?" My prediction is that for the next Olympics, some venture-capital-backed outfit will pay a fortune for "internet rights" to be the only source of streaming video, and they won't get much traffic, and it will be a big flop. We shall see. :)
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No Streams for You! More

No Streams for You!

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  • Everyone in America pools together, puts in 50 bucks, and get our hands deeper into polititians pockets than big business is.

    I hand over more than this every 15 April. See what it gets me?

  • The sad part about all this is some sports, like fencing, get no coverage in the U.S. I wouldn't care if it was televised at 3AM - I would set the VCR!

    Geez, and I thought I was the only one! I was lucky enough to get tix to some of the fencing events in '84, and was even going to try the infamous "triplecast", but reading the cable company's description, they didn't even put it there!

    The midnite shows on NBC are more of those stupid-ass human-interest interviews and rehashes of what they just showed us from 7-11. I can understand that they won't put Fencing, Modern Pentathalon and the like on in prime time (but they do put Rhythmic Gymnastics on????), but can't you give us poor folks after midnite????
  • Gymnastics' "breakout" athlete was Olga Korbut in '72.

    Re: Peter Westbrook. I met him in '84. Got his autograph somewhere, but he was kind of rude. He was probably tired though... Steve Mormando, on the other hand, was very polite and friendly.
  • i live in grand forks, ND, only a few hours from the canadian border, and our cable company carries CBC, so i'll be watching the canadion version (usually more interesting anyway - the stanley cup playoffs were way better on CBC than ESPN/ABC)... but if i remember correctly, in Canada rebroadcasting is legal so long as it is in its entirety, no?

    ---

  • Hi - correct me if I am wrong, but I seem to recall that NBC claims its "broadcast rights" to the 2004 Athens Olympics includes Internet rights. (btw the L.A. Times had a big story on how they covertly secured those broadcast rights.) Obviously the broadcast rights are currently sold on a geographic basis which makes no sense when it comes to the Internet, but as I recall this was part of the justification to exclude Internet reporters from getting press credentials at Sydney.

    Further, I read that the Canadian CBC will be showing about 18 hours of live Sydney coverage a day, compared to 0 hours by NBC.

    TWR
  • I've been reading some reports [nationalpost.com] that, thanks to NBC's time delay scheme, a lot of border towns like Detroit and Buffalo will be tuning into CBC's live coverage instead. Now, if IcraveTV [icravetv.com] was still operating, just think of the Olympics viewership NBC would lose to others who can't pick up the terrestrial signals...
  • There are probably Australians setting up web feeders right now, preparing to sell live feeds quietly to us 'murricans who want our sports. The quiet ones will probably make a couple thousand bucks, the fools who advertise will get shut down by every three-letter-agency who wants to be "tough on web 'crime'".

    <SARCASM>We can already hear the public outrage around here: "We paid fer them damn 'lympics and can't even watch 'em on TV?!?"</SARCASM>

    Hmm. Maybe the h4x0rs can splice the pirate video feeds into doubleclick's animated .GIF banners? :-)

    John

    <SARCASM> tagged for your protection. Don't write me telling me the true history of the financing of the Olympics, I really don't care.

  • "As technology is continually being controlled by a select few, the consumer ultimately loses out. Its unfortunate, and it has to stop soon. But what do we do to stop it?"

    Everyone in America pools together, puts in 50 bucks, and get our hands deeper into polititians pockets than big business is.

  • Why do companies constantly and constantly go for profits and hurt the consumers. Better question is why do we allow things like this. The answer, anytime we come up with our own solution, we get hit with lawsuits or injunctions or letters or... Its time for americans to take a stand. As technology is continually being controlled by a select few, the consumer ultimately loses out. Its unfortunate, and it has to stop soon.
    But what do we do to stop it?

    --Reggie
  • This is just another example of how an old company wants to do business the way they always have been. "We tape things, edit them up nice, and play them for all of the masses between 7pm and 11pm." They're being small minded by not wanting to either a) show things live or b) show video on demand (admittedly costlier). Sigh... So much for innovation in the new millenium.
  • The other part of this is most olympic sports given major coverage have had a "break-out" athlete at one time - Like what Mary Lou did for gymnastics, and Peggy for figure skating. Apparantly we need an American to beat all the odds and win a medal...oh, wait, we've already had that, haven't we? (Peter Westbrook)

    For that matter, I would like to see some more coverage on the World Cup games - Gotta be better than watching somebody fishing on TV.... :-)
  • Are there no other television networks in the world giving olympic coverage? Seems to me anyone with a press pass and a camcorder should be able to put up streaming content, NBC and the IOC can scream all they like, but it shouldn't matter.

    The sad part about all this is some sports, like fencing, get no coverage in the U.S. I wouldn't care if it was televised at 3AM - I would set the VCR! Internet-delivered video seems to be the only hope I have of getting ANY coverage of fencing at all, and NBC/IOC is trying to limit that? Sounds very short-sighted - the more coverage is available, the more people will watch, and want more. Granting exclusive rights to NBC is one thing, if they would provide complete coverage, but I know they won't.

    Sheesh.....Sounds like it's time to write some more letters....
  • I use Streambox VCR to save C-Net radio to a file, then I use Streambox ripper to turn it into an MP3 file that I can load onto my Rio PMP300 Special Edition, so I can listen to interesting news while exercising at a local gym.

    Since I live in Australia, US streams suck. Moreover, living in Perth there aren't any decent fast connection options anyway. If I can't download a file and turn it into an MP3 there's not much I can do about it. As such, hats off to Geeks in Space -- I hope it comes back soon.


  • My prediction is that for the next Olympics, some venture-capital-backed outfit will pay a fortune for "internet rights" to be the only source of streaming video, and they won't get much traffic, and it will be a big flop.

    That sounds a lot like the old Olympic Triplecast all over again. Does anyone remember the Triplecast? A few years ago, NBC decided that they could make big money by putting all the Olympic events on three cable channels and charging people to watch them live. This was intended to supplement NBC's mostly taped free coverage of the Olympics. It was also a huge flop.

  • Say No to Streaming (Score:3)

    by Demona ( 7994 ) on Wednesday September 06, 2000 @03:19AM (#801784) Homepage
    Streambox VCR (which the company had to yank when Real threw a hissy fit) is still floating around the net; use Google to track it down. Along similar lines, the anonymously produced ASF Recorder [freshmeat.net] is still available from a few of its mirror sites; it's a very nice, source-included, ready to run on Linux and Windows app that saves ASF streams. With these tools, we can once again DOWNLOAD FILES THE WAY GOD AND SPAF INTENDED!

    (I don't think I'd hate streaming so much if people had offered it as an alternative, instead of a replacement, and not tried to pass it off as the wave of the future that would replace all that "complicated, time-consuming downloading".

    -dj

    screaming in digital

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