I'm confused. In the iPad app I clicked time-warner cable, that I didn't have service, and I wanted a temporary pass. And then everything just worked. TWC is my ISP, but I have no cable service with them.
I'm an American and I want to watch the Olympics. What do I do?
171–180 of 191 posts
Re: I'm an American and I want to watch the Olympics. What do I do?
#172Answer: Get a cable TV subscription. If you don't want to "pirate," or be in a "grey area," then do what the license rights holder wants you to do and pony up. I pay for Frontier FiOS TV and can watch whatever events I want as part of my subscription. In many areas, the local cable company will have you installed in a day or two and you can go month-to-month. Comcast in Seattle is offering $29.99/month for the first…
Ah, but that's forcing you to buy something you don't want (a long-term cable TV subscription) to get something you do want (streaming access to the Olympics on the internet--no TV involved).
As several posters here have said, clearly there is a value to being able to watch the Olympic events you want, live. There is no reason NBC could not charge a fixed access fee for people who don't have one of the "sponsoring" pay TV services.
Re: I'm an American and I want to watch the Olympics. What do I do?
#173Answer: Get a cable TV subscription. If you don't want to "pirate," or be in a "grey area," then do what the license rights holder wants you to do and pony up. I pay for Frontier FiOS TV and can watch whatever events I want as part of my subscription. In many areas, the local cable company will have you installed in a day or two and you can go month-to-month. Comcast in Seattle is offering $29.99/month for the first…
That works.. sometimes. I tried calling comcast and they don't serve my address (it's a large apartment building). I specifically told them that I could care less if they actually installed it; I just wanted an account so I could get the olympics online. They claimed they couldn't do that though; the service had to be installable or they could get fined by some entity. My only legal option is to pay DirectTV somethin…
How old is your apartment building that you cannot get cable service? I've never run into that before.
Re: I'm an American and I want to watch the Olympics. What do I do?
#174I'm posting this in all three of the 'Olympics' threads showing up on the front page of HN:
I live in Berkeley, CA and I was able to get full access to videos, including streams and highlights, by selecting Xfinity as my service provider during my initial sign-up/activation on the NBC Olympics website.
Here at my apartment, we have no cable service and an internet provider called Zoom. So obviously, I wasn't being truthful - but instead was trying to circumvent this ridiculous corporate stranglehold during my first attempt to access Olympic footage.
I don't know if it will still work, but it worked for me on Friday and my credentials have held since - allowing my full access without login each time I access the website.
Re: I'm an American and I want to watch the Olympics. What do I do?
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
That works.. sometimes. I tried calling comcast and they don't serve my address (it's a large apartment building). I specifically told them that I could care less if they actually installed it; I just wanted an account so I could get the olympics online. They claimed they couldn't do that though; the service had to be installable or they could get fined by some entity. My only legal option is to pay DirectTV somethin…
How old is your apartment building that you cannot get cable service? I've never run into that before.
23 years. Its age is less of an issue than its size. It has 400+ units and just contracts out TV service to a local San Francisco outfit, Satel: http://www.yelp.com/biz/satel-san-francisco
Satel has a sattelite receiver on the roof that provides for the complex.
The only programming options are:
1. DirectTV (extremely expensive)
2. 'Basic' Cable, which gives only a subset of terrestrial broadcasts at only 480p. This service wouldn't qualify for nbcolympics regardless due to no cnbc, msnbc, etc.
Re: I'm an American and I want to watch the Olympics. What do I do?
#176(may I add a small comment as a (proud) ex-USSR citizen?)
In Soviet Russia, we watched Olympics.
Good luck to you guys :)
Re: I'm an American and I want to watch the Olympics. What do I do?
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd agree that if your home never had cable, SOL. And you're right that there's nothing in it for them to drive a truck around...it's just s/w setting to turn off your paid subscription. However, see my comment above re ClearQAM, and link to Fred's post.
Where in there does he, or the link he references, substantiate the following claim? 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. If you follow the link trail, you'll find this quote from the FCC: broadcast signals that are subject to mandatory carriage must be "viewabl…
I'm not trying to win a legal case here, just sayin'...
1. "The broadcast industry does not want American's to know..." Opinion. Why would they want this widely known?
2. "...legally obligated..." OK, that might be a little strong, but I stand by the POV that they can not encrypt this signal. The FCC citations (on Engadget article) make that clear (to me).
It's possible that this works for me (and others) because... I am a subscriber to my cable company for telephone and internet access (but not TV), and so they can not send a tech out to disconnect me from their grid because it would terminate my current services AND they can not encrypt the Clear QAM signal for the Broadcast TV channels.
Again, I'm not trying to argue some legal case here. But I do think it's more than just the cable company being lazy and not sending a technician out.
Re: I'm an American and I want to watch the Olympics. What do I do?
#178Sign 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
Proxies like unotelly may send more of your traffic through their service than you would like. You can protect your traffic but still use the tunnel if you only send bbc.co.uk DNS lookups to unotelly.
Here's how to do this in Ubuntu 12.04. The DNS has changed in 12.04 to use NetworkManager, which makes the process more convoluted than it should be. The below instructions could be improved but it'll get you some BBC Olympics coverage.
# https://gist.github.com/3202101
Ubuntu 12.04
$ nslookup bbc.co.uk # you should see a UK IP e.g. 212.58.241.131
$ vi /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf # comment out dnsmasq #dns=dnsmasq
# save+quit
$ vi /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf
prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;
$ service network-manager restart
# create a new dnsmasq.conf with unotelly California DNS 184.169.139.227 206.214.214.28 # note that server=192.168.11.1 is my router (which handles my upstream DNS) and you'll need to change that IP. $ vi /etc/dnsmasq.conf
server=/bbc.co.uk/206.214.214.28212.58.241.131 server=/co.uk/206.214.214.28 server=/bbchdsodsecure-f.akamaihd.net/206.214.214.28 server=/bbchdsodsecure-a.akamaihd.net/206.214.214.28 server=/bbchdsodsecure-b.akamaihd.net/206.214.214.28 server=/bbchdsodsecure-c.akamaihd.net/206.214.214.28 server=/bbchdsodsecure-d.akamaihd.net/206.214.214.28 server=/bbchdsodsecure-e.akamaihd.net/206.214.214.28 server=/bbc.co.uk.edgesuite.net/206.214.214.28 server=/bbcfmhds.vo.llnwd.net/206.214.214.28 server=192.168.11.1
# save+quit
$ nohup /usr/sbin/dnsmasq --no-resolv --keep-in-foreground --no-hosts --bind-interfaces --pid-file=/var/run/sendsigs.omit.d/network-manager.dnsmasq.pid --listen-address=127.0.0.1 --conf-file=/etc/dnsmasq.conf --cache-size=0 --proxy-dnssec &
$ tail -f /var/log/syslog
$ nslookup bbc.co.uk # you should see unotelly proxy servers e.g. uk-cluster.unostructure.com
Re: I'm an American and I want to watch the Olympics. What do I do?
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
On Mac OS X, you can use them just for specific domains. For example, create: /etc/resolver/bbc.co.uk with the contents: nameserver 208.122.23.22 nameserver 208.122.23.23 And now you'll be using unblock-us's name servers for just bbc.co.uk and its subdomains. You could do something similar for your entire network with dnsmasq.
Does anyone know how to do this on a router running dd-wrt with dnsmasq?
Have not reset to test that it rewrites the change, but enter the below in the Additional DNSMasq box of services tab, and it should work as intended.
server=/bbc.co.uk/###.###.###.###,
ip would be for the alternate nameserver
Re: I'm an American and I want to watch the Olympics. What do I do?
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does this work?
Are you saying technically under the hood, or just how does a person use the service? Using the service is trivial for anybody on HN. Just a matter of setting your DNS settings to specific servers. That's it. Technically... I'm still trying to figure that one out. I think what they do is handle the IP check from the service, and then pass off the stream to your computer. This would make sense since the stream server…
You've got the right idea. I ended up implementing my own proxy for Netflix as you describe. I use dnsmasq to hijack the relevant DNS requests and then I wrote my own https proxy to proxy the API connections. The actual streams come from CDNs of which are not concerned about your country of origin.