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I'm an American and I want to watch the Olympics. What do I do?

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Re: I'm an American and I want to watch the Olympics. What do I do?

#101

Post by Steuard »

jimhirshfield wrote: post #69

This won't get you live coverage, but it will get you legal NBC coverage on your home TV... The broadcast industry does not want American's to know this, but they are legally obligated to provide the free "over the air" stations on cable (coax) even if you do not pay for cable service. In other words, do what I have done: 1. You need a modern cable-ready TV 2. Plug the coax into the wall (assumes your residence had c…

Do you have a link where I can read up on this? I'm willing to believe you, but it sounds too good to be true.

Re: I'm an American and I want to watch the Olympics. What do I do?

#102

Post by ApolloRising »

bdz wrote: post #10

does this work in the us? http://www.eurovisionsports.tv/london2012/index.html this is the official european broadcast stream. simply the best, every event in live and you can also replay them. plus there is no commentator here, just the raw broadcast (i hate when commentators talk too much...)

Just tried from Los Angeles, did not work.

Re: I'm an American and I want to watch the Olympics. What do I do?

#103

Post by ja27 »

jimhirshfield wrote: post #69

This won't get you live coverage, but it will get you legal NBC coverage on your home TV... The broadcast industry does not want American's to know this, but they are legally obligated to provide the free "over the air" stations on cable (coax) even if you do not pay for cable service. In other words, do what I have done: 1. You need a modern cable-ready TV 2. Plug the coax into the wall (assumes your residence had c…

Are you sure cable providers are required to provide free over-the-air stations? I haven't heard of that being a requirement and can't find anything online except vague claims without citations. I've heard of low-cost plans that provide all the equivalent over-the-air stations, but no legal requirement to provide those for free.

That said, this certainly does work for some people. It worked for us for a while after we dropped the TV part of our plan but then one day we couldn't receive any channels over the coax, so I assume they installed a filter.

Re: I'm an American and I want to watch the Olympics. What do I do?

#104

Post by TheGateKeeper »

mindslight wrote: post #68
acabal wrote: post #53

This exact same thing happened to me today! I'm in Germany, so I put the Olympics on TV. But I don't yet speak German, so after an hour I wanted to watch them in English. I went to the NBC web site, but they geolocate your IP and only stream to US people. Fine, I'm used to this crap (lots of Youtube videos are blocked in Germany too) so I just fired up my proxy and tried again. This time I got through, only to find t…

> Wasn't the internet supposed to break through barriers like space and location? The Internet philosophy eschews these things, but the implementation simply ignores them. Of course the incumbents desire to reimplement their archaic business models on top of TCP/IP. It's up to us to carry the philosophy and create higher level protocols that are resistant to such things; fiefdom-based HTTP certainly isn't.

It not only ignores them but people purposely place these restrictions on them for greedy reasons.

Frankly, in my experience it doesn't take a lot to enable multicast and doing it internet wide _shouldn't_ be that big of a deal so we can handle all the streaming of live events with little worry - but the "powers that be" want to restrict everything online and it's frustrating, angering and downright dangerous attitude to have as a defacto "standard".

Re: I'm an American and I want to watch the Olympics. What do I do?

#105

Post by ja27 »

recoiledsnake wrote: post #93

>I didn’t go out and buy an antenna, but I was able to tune quite a few channels Why not buy an antenna, especially an amplified one? That will run circles around using a shielded coax cable as an antenna. >FAIL. There is no good way to watch the Olympics in the United States without a cable subscription Sorry, that doesn't follow when you didn't even try a TV antenna.

We're watching NBC broadcast right now on a pair of rabbit-ears. That works fine for the popular events if you don't mind the delay.

As long as we're mentioning various grey-hat techniques to view content from the BBC and others without paying for it, there are sites like thefirstrow.eu that carry streams from the BBC and other international broadcasters. I'm not encouraging you to use those, but it is an interesting situation. NBC can't issue a DMCA takedown on those streams because they don't own that content. If the BBC has no interest in shutting down those streams, they may never be shut down.

Re: I'm an American and I want to watch the Olympics. What do I do?

#107

Post by Spooky23 »

Posibyte wrote: post #50
ConstantineXVI wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have the relevant package; but Insight won't even acknowledge our login to use the app. They can keep their streams and ad-views if they don't want to make it even half-usable.

I have roughly the same problem. I spend around $140/mo for internet and cable, of which I receive the full NBC suite of channels. However, the app refuses my provider's login information. When I contacted my provider, they just sent me up to an NBC support clerk who told me essentially "Wow, that really sucks." and that was it. There was no recourse, simply re-acknowledging that I had a problem and they would attemp…

You might want to verify that your provider doesn't have multiple login schemes. My Time Warner franchise has one account for payment and account services "pay express" and another for service access "my services".

The Olympics requires the services credential.

Re: I'm an American and I want to watch the Olympics. What do I do?

#108

Post by spydum »

zaim wrote: post #106

I'm not in the US but I've been watching the Olympics on YouTube - http://youtube.com/user/olympic - this is the official Olympics channel. Funny nobody's mentioned this. Is the channel not available in the US?

It actually says not available in your country .. just tried it.

Re: I'm an American and I want to watch the Olympics. What do I do?

#109

Post by damian2000 »

+1 BBC

The broadcaster of the first public TV signal back in 1936 and still going strong today.

"On November 2, 1936 the BBC began transmitting the world's first public television service from the Victorian Alexandra Palace in north London[12] following alternate daily test broadcasts of the Baird and Marconi systems to the Radio Show at Olympia at the end of August. It therefore claims to be the birthplace of television broadcasting as we know it today." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_television

Re: I'm an American and I want to watch the Olympics. What do I do?

#110

Post by yaix »

acabal wrote: post #53

This exact same thing happened to me today! I'm in Germany, so I put the Olympics on TV. But I don't yet speak German, so after an hour I wanted to watch them in English. I went to the NBC web site, but they geolocate your IP and only stream to US people. Fine, I'm used to this crap (lots of Youtube videos are blocked in Germany too) so I just fired up my proxy and tried again. This time I got through, only to find t…

I guess you just explained why sites like ThePirateBay are so extremely popular.
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