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Why does NBC make it so difficult to watch the Olympics?

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Re: Why does NBC make it so difficult to watch the Olympics?

#261

If you have cable TV, you can watch everything at nbcolympics.com/schedule so it’s actually quite accessible. I believe you can watch 30 minutes of content without signing in using your cable account. Also, the author is wrong. NBC broadcast the opening ceremonies at 7am [0]. The author must have seen a rebroadcast. [0] https://sports.nbcsports.com/2021/07/23/when-do-the-tokyo-ol...

I do not know anybody with cable TV. It's like saying "If you have a rotary phone..."

[deleted]

Re: Why does NBC make it so difficult to watch the Olympics?

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I thought uk left Europe :(

EU != Europe. The UK left the political and economic union called the EU, they are still very much part of Europe.

Huh, I was thinking of Europe as a political entity such that "Exclusive rights to broadcast in Europe" would exclude UK, but TIL thanks

Re: Why does NBC make it so difficult to watch the Olympics?

#263
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone I know sans maybe one person has cable/satellite. So I don't know what future you're living in. The problem to me is they aren't showing replays that I feel a lot of people want to see on air, so you can't watch at a bar/restaurant. This to me is the major problem with sports on streaming. People like to watch at bars, but bars often don't have streaming devices on hand or a staff that wants to deal with it.

I think the people that have cable/satellite TV are roughly the same ones that still have landline phones. Sure, it exists, not like there's nobody, but I'm pretty sure it's less than half in total.

I can think of tons of people I know with cable and the only person I can think of with a landline is my grandma, and my stepdad’s extremely rural vacation cabin

Re: Why does NBC make it so difficult to watch the Olympics?

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this downvoted? This bleak future isn't too far off honestly. Can't wait until the advertisers start literally torturing us as punishment for withholding our attention. When I watched that episode for the first time I was horrified but reality is even worse: these people think we're literal criminals who are stealing from them if we don't watch ads.

Probably because YouTube and Spotify are already peppered with such interruptions “upgrade to premium today to disable these annoying ads”

Not even close to the same. Bing was unable to even close his eyes to avoid viewing the ads, and was literally inundated from all sides with all senses they could reach.

We get closer to this every single day.

But this is HN, 1/4[1] of the UB are probably in ads one way or another (ie work for fb/goog et al), another 1/4 of the UB are of the 'growth hacking win at all costs wannabe-CEO (ie lying and creating fake accts a la reddit, you name it).

But I hope another 1/4 of us are conscientious objectors. Leaving 1/4 for those who can't be bothered.

Anyways I usually assume 1/4-1/2 or more of HN will usually disagree with what I say, I don't mind.

[1] All numbers pulled from my behind.

Re: Why does NBC make it so difficult to watch the Olympics?

#265
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they just have some weird hangup about buying a $10 antenna and connecting it to their television. I think this hang up could be the installation. Where I live you need to mount the antenna at least on an exterior wall, if not the roof to get a clear signal. Then you have to run coax to your TV, through walls, perhaps multiple locations or you can only watch broadcast on that one TV. It’s easily hours of work, includ…

> Then you have to run coax to your TV, through walls You can also try under, over, or around the side of a door, or through a window, using a small section of flat coax like this [1]. An alternative I've considered is an Amazon Fire TV Recast [2]. That's an OTA DVR that physically connects to an antenna and power, and then can stream live or recorded content over your Wifi to an Amazon Fire TV Stick plugged into you…

And if you don't want to deal with Amazon hardware in your home SiliconDust [0] has been doing this for a long time and their products work well.

[0] https://www.silicondust.com/

Re: Why does NBC make it so difficult to watch the Olympics?

#266
post #85

Just let me send you $20 for an Olympics "pass" and give me access to multiple streams so I can pick which events to watch — without commercials. Is that bad business? Because I'm afraid I am sitting out the Olympics this year. :-(

That's what's available in Germany. It seems like they livestream every competition, sometimes without commentary. Check whether they blocked your region here: https://www.zdf.de/sport/sport-im-zdf-livestream-live-100.ht...

Unfortunately, it is blocked in Canada. (I think, because in German.) Too bad.

Re: Why does NBC make it so difficult to watch the Olympics?

#267
man so much whinging. This guy is not the target market and clearly NBC only half-cares but is in a position to do so and the eyeballs they get from the "home at 5PM, turn on feed and leave it running til 11PM" is enough for the advertisers and the operation on a nightly. This is likely how it's been for 20 years so this is nothing new.

Re: Why does NBC make it so difficult to watch the Olympics?

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least on the Apple TV app, I don't think that would be easy. It seems to have ads embedded into the video stream, or at least triggered at specific fixed timestamps in the video stream, and they disable seeking during ad playback, and when you seek across an ad timestamp, they skip you back to the previous ad timestamp, then after the ad finishes they skip you back to the timestamp you seeked to.

Several years ago in the NHL app, poor connectivity with the ad server caused the ads to be skipped. It's possible that this somewhat different app could work the same way...

It's possible, but it really appears to me that these ads are not videos that are loaded separately, but are simply portions of the video stream that the app has tagged with timestamps indicating that they are ads. Perhaps pi-holing the ad server could prevent it from loading metadata about these ad timestamps, but I would guess that it's simply shipped as part of the request that loads all the necessary metadata about the video stream. This really feels more like a system to prevent skipping commercials that are already in the video stream, and less like an integration with a third-party ads SDK that loads its own ads and shows them over the real video.

Re: Why does NBC make it so difficult to watch the Olympics?

#269
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a condition of Taiwan entering the Olympics at all. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-26/taiwan-chinese-taipei... I wonder, whilst looking at Hong Kong, why Taiwan would be at all worried about the One Country, Two Systems rule...

I'm miffed that paulg publicly posts criticisms of the CCP, yet it's gotten my account flagged on HN for posting the same things about a half dozen times. Sometimes just questions about what people think the long term outcome will be. The desire is to keep this type of conversation off of HN (flamewar and politics), and admittedly sometimes my tone descends to that level, but it's frustrating that I have kept my mout…

He doesn't post here anymore (username pg) and multiple times on his Twitter feed has critiqued the current (?) users of HN beings angry at everything and all the time privileged Californians. Tons of stuff he tweets in general is not kosher here anyway.

You can easily find a lot that stuff, use twitters search. I doubt he cares who posts here or what's going on, he moved on.

Re: Why does NBC make it so difficult to watch the Olympics?

#270

man so much whinging. This guy is not the target market and clearly NBC only half-cares but is in a position to do so and the eyeballs they get from the "home at 5PM, turn on feed and leave it running til 11PM" is enough for the advertisers and the operation on a nightly. This is likely how it's been for 20 years so this is nothing new.

How is this 'so much whinging? He clearly explains what his pain is and also adds the fact that maybe NBC did not optimize for him. He further adds that even for the people NBC is optimizing for, he thinks (his own opinion) that those people might not be best served by this approach.
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