Welcome to the age of the internet video. At the moment, it’s possible to see more streaming video than at any time previously. Companies such as ABC and CBS proudly display the majority of their programming on their websites, viewable on demand. Earlier this summer, I was able to watch the majority of the EURO 2008 on the internet, which was great.
Today kicks off the beginning of one of the world’s largest sporting events, the summer Olympics. I love watching the Olympics, I have since I was old enough to understand what they were. This year, unfortunately, marks the first that I won’t be seeing much of the games.
I’m not a huge fan of sportscasters. The majority of them talk about superfluous facts, statistics and trivia during a given event, instead of calling the game like they should. Add that to American broadcasting companies’ tendency to add in player bios and stupid, flashy graphics, and the result is a production that takes away from, rather than adds to, the event being broadcast. There are very few people who I’ve seen pull off a good job of sportscasting, and the only one I’ve ever actually enjoyed listening to is Rick Jenerette, the voice of the Buffalo Sabres… who, unfortunately, Isn’t covering the Olympics.
I’ve essentially ruled out watching the games on broadcast TV because of the aforementioned reasons. Usually, when an event is broadcast streaming on the internet; it’s much less overproduced. I turned again with a hopeful eye to the internet to bring me a less watered down version of the games, only to be severely disappointed. In the US, NBC owns the rights to the Olympics, and as such, are the only ones who can stream the games on the internet. For some reason, they’ve mandated that if you would like to stream the games, you must be running a copy of Windows Vista.
I’ve never written about my opinions regarding Vista, but suffice it to say my review is less than glowing, and I currently run XP. As such, I can’t watch the games on NBC’s website, so I turned to less… mainstream methods. My first attempt to view the Olympics was simply a google search for “Olympics 2008 Streaming Video”, which lead me to a website which was broadcasting the opening ceremonies from somewhere in the Mediterranean in a language I didn’t understand, and their chatter was almost as bad as the Americans.
I then attempted to watch the games on cbc’s website, but naturally, they don’t stream outside Canada. I tried a number of proxy servers, but they were either too slow for video or didn’t work. I then tried to use the BBC, but I ran into the same issue as I did with Cananda. I went back to the Mediterranean website and watched what was left of the opening ceremonies.
I don’t know how many average internet users will be able to even locate the obscure Mediterranean website, but my guess is ‘not many’. It frustrates me that an event as global as the olympics is going to be so difficult to watch, and I probably won’t catch as much of it as I would really like to.
