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Comment by w1ntermute | Hacker News Reader

This seems pointless. If you're going to watch BBC content without paying their licensing fee, you might as well torrent it - that way you're not using up their bandwidth.

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> This seems pointless. If you're going to watch BBC content without paying their licensing fee, you might as well torrent it - that way you're not using up their bandwidth.

I would happily pay them for access, the problem is that being in the US I quite literally can't. If there was a "pay $50 for live steaming of the olympics" button I would click it happily, it just doesn't exist.

Send them a cheque. They choose not to account for the possibility of people taking advantage of their good nature. You should give them the option of accepting payment.

The BBC aren't allowed to serve customers outside of the UK even if they wanted to due to the licensing agreements they have with content owners. NBC is the exclusive broadcaster in the United States. Anyone offering the Olympics to US viewers is in breach of their licensing agreement.

It's for the bandwidth not the content. And I'm sure they wouldn't take it, I'd just like to see the response.

While you wouldn't be able to get them to accept direct payment for this service (since they aren't allowed to sell it to Americans), you could choose to donate to one of the other programs they run that accepts donations, such as this one: https://secure.thebiggive.org.uk/donate/donate.php?charity_i...

Where are these torrents, with high quality video posted in near real time?

EDIT: I'm half serious, I wouldn't mind seeing Phelps lose, I missed it live. I'm an American, the NBC video website doesn't let me log in for some reason even though I have a valid account that worked yesterday (no error message, it just brings me back to the login screen every time), and they seem to be scrubbing YouTube quite well.

My private tracker has 720p recordings of events 10-15 minutes after they end.

So when you said "this seems pointless", you meant "this seems pointless if you have access to some particular private bittorrent tracker". I trust you can see the difference there :)

Getting access to a private tracker isn't that hard, and you can probably find the stuff on EZTV anyway.

We are all ears.

> Where are these torrents, with high quality video posted in near real time?

We should see a solution to that soon. http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/13/bittorrent-live/

Sopcast has been around for many years..

You're right! I forgot that it was p2p.

> live

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