Why is it that we manage to have tons of international events shown live without mass hysteria but NBC refuses to do it with the olympics.
Like especially considering it’s only a 5 hour difference. I don’t remember America freaking out during the World Cup, and the Euro Cup or Wimbeldon or any of the other tons of international sporting events in a year.
But come time for the Olympics unless you work at NBC you’ll never know when anything is on.
The god damned Royal Wedding and fucking Diamond Jubilee weren’t on delay either. Everything worked out fine. You know why? Because no one was granted an exclusivity contract regarding the airing of the events on television. The thing that really gets me is that this isn’t original content. It’s coverage of an event; it’s news. This is branded and controlled news and an argument can be made that this is censorship.
I’m also wondering how television rights translate to video being shared from overseas on the internet by users, *not* for-profit corporations. In a normal dispute of this nature lawyers must draft cease and desist letters and send them out to the people they have a grievance with. That isn’t happening here. Videos are just being pulled down without any possible form of recourse.
The Olympics are not content. The events are news and the footage is being massively manipulated and controlled by mega corporations. Is this business model going to spread? Is this what the IOC should be doing? Do they have a right to grant a monopoly in a country of 330 million people? Should NBC have policing powers to just take down shit without investigation or trial? Where is the due process?
My tax money is used to fund my Olympic team, but I have no right to see them perform in real time if people are willing to provide me with that coverage, because a private corporation says so? Michael Phelps represents me, because I pay for him to be able to compete. The Olympics are the games of the people, not corporations.
The IOC has been corrupted by people like Romney who put profit before ethics. Look forward to this type of management if he wins. Fuck, we can probably expect it even if he doesn’t. Rich people are paying attention right now…. I’m sorry, job creators. They will steal whatever they can from us in order to mark it up and sell it back to us, especially if we are already supporting the ‘product’ through taxes.
It should also be noted that the FCC needs to be brought into this for allowing the merger of Comcast and NBC. The 2008 Olympics were free to watch online as they were sponsored by Microsoft Silverlight (I believe the technology that Netflix is built on). NBC is a network station available to anyone with a television, but now that a cable company bought them, you can only view the events online if you have proof of subscription to that specific cable company, despite the fact that NBC is also carried on other delivery systems like Dish.
I don’t mean to blow this up into an even bigger issue than it is in the moment, but it really is that big of a deal. This is setting precedent. The Olympics should not be a private event. NBC should not have policing powers. Comcast has absolutely nothing to do with the Olympics. The Olympics are news and therefor public domain. The IOC should not be a for profit organization. This is a much bigger deal than simply missing the Men’s 400 Medley in swimming or NBC smothering you with political propaganda and selectively covering what we all understand to be an international event (we understand that we will not ‘get’ everything).
/rant
(Source: ahandsomestark)
10 months ago • 12 notes
