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

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 that they're asking me to log in to a cable provider first! What the hell!

After scouring the internet I found a huge list of Olympics streaming broadcasters. Turns out the BBC is broadcasting online too. So I try them--same thing, blocked outside of the UK! But this time I don't have a proxy in the UK, so I gave up and watched the damn thing in German.

I get the theory of having to go through a cable provider login to get the US Olympics. But what if you're a taxpaying UK citizen abroad for a while? You've paid your tax--but you still can't access the stream!

Wasn't the internet supposed to break through barriers like space and location? In the year 2012 am I seriously being denied an English-language broadcast of a global event just because my laptop is currently in Germany?

Sure I can jump through even more hoops and figure out a UK-based VPN or some crap. But the point is I shouldn't have to do this! We're in 2012 people! Why even have the internet if we're just going to lock up information according to where you live?

Personally, I prefer www.unblock-us.com

Yes, it's that simple. And this is NOT using the coax as an RF antenna. This is the cable company providing me with what I am legally entitled to: over the air stations in a digital age.

The cable companies are trying to fight this, but as of now, it exists. It's legal. And it works. My son's watching PBS Kids as I type. And we watched many Olympic events through-out the days today - OK, not live, but still I DO NOT PAY FOR TV.

To answer the point of "NBC pays the government," they do: for broadcast spectrum only. All the other channels with Olympics content are not covered by that payment.

Edit: Even though I live in the UK, this is how I watch TV because with a bit of scripting it's a lot more convenient than having a TV.

At a very basic level, they could offer live streaming of all events --advertising free-- for a fee. I would gladly pay, say, US $100 for this service. Some might only be interested in a subset of events, which means that there's a possibility to create tiers and capture revenue at various levels.

Here in the US, as has been discussed in this and other threads, NBC has royally fucked up things beyond all recognition. I finally broke down and downloaded their app. It's shit. The ads are intrusive TV-style ads. What's worst, they have some sort of a bug somewhere that is causing videos to end prematurely.

As and example, I tried watching Archery, Judo and Taekwondo pre-recorded events (not live). One of them was supposed to be a five hour event. We watched about fifteen minutes and the stream stopped with a message that read something akin to "This video has ended". There was no way to watch it beyond that point. It literally stopped in the middle of the action.

The other moronic thing is the way the video ads are inserted. They seem to be using a simple timer to determine when to run a video ad. This means that they'll interrupt your viewing in the middle of a match --just as someone is throwing a kick-- to run a stupid ad. Unbelievable.

I am hoping that there's widespread dissatisfaction with this and that the next Olympics, World Cup, etc. see a massive change. I'd really like to see a true Internet company get the rights and do it right. The IOC could make far more than what NBC and others are paying for these events by having a single-point internationally-friendly Internet strategy rather than old-school per country/region licensing.

Finally, a note to NBC advertisers: I am NOT watching your ads. Stop paying NBC! We DVR the coverage and are masterfully skilled at fast-forwarding through your commercials. When I am watching gymnastics I could not care less about your movie or your insurance offering. So, stop supporting broadcasters, you are wasting your money in a monumental way.

So the author ended up paying to watch the Olympics. Illegally, instead of legally, I would add.

Legally, I’m unclear of if an American connecting on a VPN to a live stream in the UK is breaking the law. I would guess that it hasn’t really come up with the TV license people yet.

I don't know about the UK law, but nearby Ireland has a similar "TV Licence". The law there is not "you need a licence to watch TV", but "if you're in Ireland and you have something that's capable of recieving TV signals, then you need a TV licence".

If the UK is similar, then it's not "watch BBC" that requires a licence, but "owning a TV in the UK". The OP almost certainly does not own a TV in the UK, so almost certainly not need a TV licence.

(NB: There may or may not be terms & conditions on the iPlayer website which say you may only access it if you are in UK / have a TV licence / etc., which might make the above the illegal (but not for TV licence reasons). I'm suprised the Olympics works for them, usually BBC iPlayer stuff uses GeoIP to block it from non-UK IP addresses.)

I spent 45 minutes online with the Suddenlink support person and got my account setup with username and password

ALL SET right?

So, with the Suddenlink support person on the phone I login to the NBCOlympics.com site and select Suddenlink.

I key in my username and password.

In about a minute the screen pops up and says I am all set to WATCH THE OLYMPICS LIVE.

Joy!!

Then in about 10 seconds another screen pops up:

"You do not have a subscription to view the requested content. Contact Suddenlink to upgrade your programming then log back in to view content."

What the heck??

So I ask the very helpful Suddenlink support person still waiting on the phone: What Up?

She confirms that since I do not have the EXTENDED basic package with optional add-ons with Suddenlink I do not qualify to WATCH THE OLYMPICS LIVE

BY THE WAY:

Did you read the nbcolympics.com FAQ:

"Q: What is required for accessing Live Extra content? A: You will need to verify that you subscribe to a cable, satellite or telco video tier that includes CNBC and MSNBC. There is no additional charge."

I do have CNBC and MSNBC. CNBC is channel 255 and MSNBC is channel 264 (in my market area)

And yet I cannot WATCH THE OLYMPICS LIVE

In the terms of the Olympics here is my message to NBC LET THE GAMES BEGIN - THE INTERNETS ALWAYS WIN.

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/ - not sure if it would work in Amazon's Ireland data center, but worth a try.

Note that I believe you need to pay the licence fee to legally watch iPlayer (IIRC it pops up a dialog the first time you run it to confirm you've paid). So even in the UK you have to "pay for TV" to get this service. It costs approx £12/month.

To watch on your pc, they partnered with Youtube Live: http://www.youtube.com/user/nosnlsport

which gives me: "The uploader has not made this video available in your country. " which is a bit strange (living in the Netherlands).

Fortunately it is quite easy to proxy stuff via the UK :)

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-walled content, or turn to the pirate bay.

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...)

What did I miss?

Edit: Thanks for the quick answers.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4305905

NBC ought to be ashamed. Their online offering is pure crap.

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

To buy my nexus 1 phone, I had to use a machine in US. I bought some other stuff from UK that way, using my machine in UK. But then UK started blocking other sites, so I had move that machine to Germany.

Someone needs to come up with a research paper, showing the optimum number of virtual machines needed to access the whole internet (with their locations). Or better, make a business out of it.

You want them to modernize? Get as many people as you can to stop using cable for TV.

Funny nobody's mentioned this. Is the channel not available in the US?

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.

I use a similar one to access Facebook when traveling to China.

It's the official site of all european broadcasters.

You have access to all the live streams (without commentary) from all the arenas and all the live streams from all european stations.

Just enter bbc, zdf, ard, etc... in the search box to get the corresponding live stream with their commentary.

It also works if you are blocked on the broadcasters website (e.g. i can't watch the zdf live stream, but can watch it here).

They have live streams for each olympics and for some special events.

It's way more versatile than signing up for just VPN.

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

Heh, it's good, but this is overstating it a bit.

I just tested this using a free proxy. Any slow/unstable proxy will work just fine.

It seems to work from the webproxy i used but i'm not sure my ip was properly hidden.

Anyway, for once french television is not behind, they broadcast all the sports live on their website without any commentary.

The problem is that digital transmission doesn't gracefully degrade like analog transmission does. If you're at the outer part of a transmitter's range, with the legacy analog signal, you might have been able to get an adequate signal with slightly fuzzy picture or static-y sound. But receiving a digital signal is largely a binary affair; you're either in-range and receive it, or out-of-range and you don't. *

Another issue is the economics; most people get their TV through cable. So it doesn't necessarily make economic sense for stations to build new transmitters to make their post-digital range equal their pre-digital range, especially if the new dead zones are in low-population-density areas.

Online streaming is so technically superior to broadcast -- there's no technical reason you can't get what you want, when you want it; and the maximum number of channels we can support isn't limited by scarce electromagnetic spectrum -- that I foresee traditional broadcast TV being completely replaced within the next 10-30 years.

It's still new enough, however, that the social, political, and legal issues still have to be worked out. I.e. FCC requirements to provide broadcast-equivalent service should probably apply to ISP's, but they don't. And companies like NBC should realize it's in their best interest to make content available at reasonable prices "ala carte" online, but they don't.

It's particularly interesting to see that recently services like Hulu or Youtube are running pilot programs for producing original content. Essentially the reason NBC et al can get away with offering customers awful service without having their lunch eaten by startups is that they by-and-large have a monopoly on content that people want to see. But if similar content becomes available from other services at lower cost and/or on saner terms, they'll be forced to change their business or die off. In other words, someone needs to do to NBC what iTunes did to the music industry. There are plenty of people in this space; Hulu, Netflix, Youtube, many others.

Online video is still a very immature industry because only within the last 10-15 years has bandwidth and decoding horsepower sufficient for streaming video become available to most people. Over time the free market should iron out a more efficient solution to connecting viewers, content producers and content aggregators, but many existing businesses are enormously large and entrenched, so the process will take time.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_terrestrial_television#...

* This isn't strictly true; you might get some artifacts in marginal situations, but these tend to be much more noticeable and much less acceptable than with analog. The "in-range" and "out-of-range" might change over time due to weather.

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.

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.

Good luck to you guys :)