Comment by acabal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acabal | Hacker News Reader

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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 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?

> 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".

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.

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

Having read through this whole discussion a couple of times now, I find myself wondering why either NBC or the Olympics can't do the "smart" thing - sell me access directly. Sure if they want to do a partner offer for "free" they can do so. But why not let me buy a $30 pass for the games? I think there are a lot of us who don't want a cable package who wouldn't mind paying for the content we do want.

> 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.

Yep, we are in 2012, yet just because some things are possible (like access to TV from every source across the globe), doesn't mean to say those things are permissible.

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