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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?

#81

Post by ConstantineXVI »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #55
sudonim wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry - I updated the article, but as the other reply mentioned, Telemundo is a channel in Spanish.

Is there a radio broadcast you can listen to for sound whilst watching the images from Telemundo. I've heard of people doing this to choose a superior radio commentary whilst watching sport on TV in the UK.

AFAIK, NBC/Telemundo doesn't own any radio stations. And since NBC isn't broadcasting live, even if someone was running a radio broadcast it's highly unlikely they'd be in sync.

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

#82

Post by dhughes »

kennywinker wrote: post #47

As a Canadian, I run into this bullshit all the time. Comedy Central embedded videos, hulu, etc. The whole thing seems like a perversion of the promise of the internet: to connect us all... It's double ironic in the OPs case, given the stated goals of the olympics. Going around via VPN is well within my technical means, but I don't want to support the people who behave this way online, so I usually don't view the geo…

Canadian here too.

I also tend to do the same I can use a VPN or figure out some way to get around restrictions but then I think why?

If I'm blocked I'm not going out of my way to generate ad revenue or support such behaviour, it's called the World Wide Web for a reason.

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

#83

Post by jimhirshfield »

illumin8 wrote: post #79
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…

NBC is only broadcasting Olympic events on cable channels, not on the basic NBC OTA channels...

I'm watching women's beach volleyball on NBC (Channel 4 in the NYC metro area) as I type this (8:12pm on Sat 28 July)

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

#84

Post by mocko »

arkx wrote: post #36

If you're comfortable with SSH you could also just fire up an EC2 or Linode instance in UK, install a local proxy and tunnel traffic through it. It's way more versatile than signing up for just VPN.

Excellent instructions for doing this on a mac with http://www.mikeash.com/ssh_socks.html

I am an Englishman sheltering from the Olympics in NYC (public transport in London was always going to be a mess) and even though I possess a UK TV license I had to tunnel through my machine at home to watch the opening ceremony.

It's a shame the BBC can't just sell a stream to people elsewhere in the world but the licenses under which they get the content will prevent it. Otherwise people could get content from the lowest bidder in the world, meaning commoditisation and a massive hit to the content owners who wouldn't get to sell the rights over and over again in different countries.

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

#85

Post by paul9290 »

This Olympics insanity (needing to subscribe to cable TV to watch a over the air broadcast; Comcasts owns NBC Universal) is a great reason why services like http://Aereo.com need to thrive!

Does anyone here have Aereo and are using it to watch the Olympics?

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

#86

Post by josephlord »

cabalamat wrote: post #78

It would make sense for the BBC to run their own VPN-like service so people outside the UK could view their content.

???

If they wanted to unblock the world they could just do that without a VPN.

Their license from the IOC will require them to take measures keep their services to the territory they have rights to (the UK). If they allowed their services to be accessed globally they would only get the rights that they bought globally.

If any VPN gets too popular you can expect them to block it too. You may need to factor this into how much you pay for a VPN.

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

#87

Post by baby »

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.

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

#88

Post by js2 »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #61
dave84 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still based on proxy servers, but their DNS server returns the address of their proxy server instead of the real IP address.

As with any DNS provider they can presumably spoof any site they wish too; so I'd be pretty cautious about using them for all DNS calls.

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.

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

#90

Post by ernestipark »

Great post. FWIW, the mobile app that NBC has is 10000x better than their website, and sometimes is even faster and better quality (iPhone). This is a good example of developing for mobile first... The mobile experience strips down all the unnecessary cruft and gets you to what you want immediately. As soon as I logged on to the app, I was able to see all live streaming videos in a nice interface and get to what I wanted. Can't say the same about the wesite.
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