Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

iamnotaprogrammer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 191 posts

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

#141

Post by GlenAnderson »

baby wrote: post #87
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…

> We're in 2012 people! Exactly, everyone is now able to find a quick and easy to use VPN. Wasn't that easy few years ago.

My mother doesn't even know what a VPN is. Even if she did, she wouldn't know how to use one to watch the bbc coverage abroad as a license fee paying UK-citizen.

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

#142

Post by manojlds »

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?

Yeah, going to youtube.com brings a top bar with info on what is being streamed and takes you to the official channel. Works awesome here in India.

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

#143

Post by rprasad »

Pay for it. Broadcasting the Olympics costs NBC lots of money. These deals are how they pay those costs. (And if it wasn't NBC, it would be CBS, ABC, or Fox.)

One of the hazards of giving up living television is that...you give up live television. NBC is not obligated to do squat for you if it can't make money from you. It's a business, not a charity.

And stop praising the BBC. It's not free. Brits pay a mandatory tax to support the BBC, so it is no different from cable/satellite TV in the U.S.

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

#144

Post by kristofferR »

OmarIsmail wrote: post #5

Sign up for www.unblock-us.com or www.unotelly.com and watch the amazing BBC coverage on iPlayer. Super super simple setup. Personally, I prefer www.unblock-us.com

Just use http://tunlr.net/ 's DNS servers instead - it's the same type of service, just completely free and with no signup required.

Primary DNS: 64.250.122.104 Secondary DNS: 199.167.30.144

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

#145

Post by robotmay »

kevinburke wrote: post #41

I'm in London for the Olympics and have been blown away by the BBC - from the usability of their website, the lack of commercials, the generally high quality of commentary and online material, to the 24 hi-definition channels of Olympic coverage live on TV in the flat we are renting. I wrote up some instructions about how to use EC2 as a web proxy here - http://kev.inburke.com/kevin/how-to-use-ec2-as-a-web-proxy/ - n…

Rackspace Cloud has servers in London, which may be a better option.

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

#146

Post by jamesharker »

I'm actually quite surprised to see so many posts on HN discussing ways to pirate Olympic content. The BBC is restricted to UK IP addresses for a reason. Every household in Britian pays the equivalent of around $230 per year for the right to watch live television, whether it be on your phone, laptop or TV. The BBC has a finite amount of resources to spend on hosting online content & if the whole World logs on to watch the Olympics it could end up spoiling it for those of us who've paid for the service. I can understand the Americans frustration with NBC (or whatever broadcaster is showing the Olympics in your region) but if you really do want to watch the BBC, the least you can do is pay for it https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/pay-for-your-tv-licence/

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

#148

Post by dt7 »

rprasad wrote: post #143

Pay for it . Broadcasting the Olympics costs NBC lots of money. These deals are how they pay those costs. (And if it wasn't NBC, it would be CBS, ABC, or Fox.) One of the hazards of giving up living television is that...you give up live television. NBC is not obligated to do squat for you if it can't make money from you. It's a business, not a charity. And stop praising the BBC. It's not free . Brits pay a mandatory…

It is different in that if they ever do a bad job, they get a lot more pressure put on them (occasionally from the government - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-18512995). They are also monitored to make sure they at least try to have no overly political/commercial bias.

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

#149

Post by antr »

TheGateKeeper wrote: post #104
mindslight wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 attitud…

100% agree.

This time the "powers that be" are playing against the US consumer. I hope that this event sparks some empathy between the US and rest of the World. What many of the US consumers are suffering with the Olympics (broadcasting delay and accessibility), is what the RoW suffers when trying to consume US media (film and TV).

Monetising today's content with an old distribution model is a dead business, and will only help support the consumption of "pirated" content.

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

#150

Post by porlw »

rprasad wrote: post #143

Pay for it . Broadcasting the Olympics costs NBC lots of money. These deals are how they pay those costs. (And if it wasn't NBC, it would be CBS, ABC, or Fox.) One of the hazards of giving up living television is that...you give up live television. NBC is not obligated to do squat for you if it can't make money from you. It's a business, not a charity. And stop praising the BBC. It's not free . Brits pay a mandatory…

I wish people would stop harping on about the UK TV licence fee.

TV in the US is not free - you pay for it every time you buy something made by a company that spends money advertising on TV.

It's practically impossible to opt out of paying for TV in the US. At least in the UK you can opt out if you genuinely don't want to watch anything.

Post reply on HN