NBC Using Authentication Wall for Olympics

Jared Newman — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 02:51:46 +0000

At the rate online video is growing, I imagine there will be a lot of people wanting to watch the Olympics online come 2010. If that’s the case, they’d better not abandon their TV subscriptions.

Using an advanced authentication method, NBC Universal will require online viewers to prove that they subscribe to a cable, satellite or telecom subscription TV package. Even then, the customer’s service provider must agree to this deal with NBC Universal beforehand.

The report in Sports Business Journal says the authentication will be limited to live footage, while some archived footage will be available for free.

Though much of NBC’s coverage will appear over the airwaves (free to anyone with an HD tuner and antenna), the paywall is probably meant to placate service providers due to the coverage NBC spreads to its subscription channels, such as MSNBC. Without being privy to the interactions between the network and service providers, I can’t say outright that authentication is a boneheaded move on NBC’s part. It could just be a necessity in the crazy world of content licensing.

But there should be some option for non-subscribers to watch the games online, and it should be robust rather than a second-class medium. Look at what Major League Baseball is doing with its MLB.tv offerings: Picture-in-picture, live highlights, DVR, player tracking. These are luxuries that go far beyond what the TV can do, and in my opinion, they’re worth paying for.

Give me a menu of which games are happening right now, and let me open a few of them in separate frames. Give me reminders of when the next Curling match is set to air and let me watch later if I miss it. I want a clickable ticker packed with highlights from around Vancouver. Please don’t give me the same thing I could get on cable, but harder to watch. As a cable divorcee, I’d throw $20 on this hypothetical service for the duration of the games.

But these are fantasies, to be sure. Maybe NBC Universal will learn after it endures another year of subpar viewing numbers.

The T-List: iPhone Tethering, BitTorrent Blockage, Phones in Flight

Harry McCracken — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:48:18 +0000

Today’s big stories involve what you can and can’t do with PCs and phones. BitTorrent over Comcast? Okay. iPhone tethering? Not okay. Skype on a plane? On its way to not being okay. List starts after the jump…

Tether Brawl
Whenever anybody asks me if my iPhone 3G has any downsides, one of the first things I mention is that I can’t use it as a modem for my laptop. A solution seemed to be at hand yesterday when NullRiver’s $9.99 NetShare appeared in Apple’s App Store–suggesting that tethering had Apple and AT&T’s blessing as a legitimate iPhone application. But NetShare was quickly pulled from the store, leaving lots of people wondering how it got there in the first place. Assuming that it was Apple rather than NullRiver that yanked the software, it’s a good example of how the iPhone’s App Store-only distribution lets Cupertino render judgment on each and every iPhone program. Even if it’s not clear how NetShare got out there in the first place.

Read more at: PC World, ZDNet, Cult of Mac, TechCrunch

The FCC Sides With BitTorrent
Score one for Net neutrality advocates: The FCC has voted 3-2 that Comcast’s throttling of Internet bandwidth for folks who used the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing network was illegal. It’s the first time an ISP has been found to have violated Net Neutrality laws; Comcast had already ended the throttling back in March, but says that it’s considering its legal options. Me, I’m worried about this New York Times blog item’s statement that AT&T blocks Slingbox’s Slingplayer on its wireless network–you wanna look into that, FCC?

Read more at: CNET News.com, eWeek

The Sounds of Silence
The House of Representatives’ Transportation and Infrastructure Committee voted to pass the Halting Airplane Noise to Give Us Peace act–better known as HANG UP–on to the full House for consideration. The law would ban in-flight telephone calls; as airlines such as American and Virgin America begin to roll out airborne Wi-Fi, it’s clear that one way or another, policies on Skype need to be in place. When the feds get involved in telling people what they can and can’t do with electronics equipment, my instinct always to be skeptical. On the other hand, the spectre of sitting next to someone who chooses to spend a six-hour flight yammering about his or her personal life is utterly gut-wrenching.

Read more at: PC World, Engadget, Crave

A Brief History of “We Don’t Suck” Ads
Microsoft’s “Mojave Experiment” ads for Vista, which show it tricking Vista doubters into believing a ten-minute Vista demo involves a wonderful new version of Windows, continue to spur chatter online. I like Gizmodo’s look at past ads from Chrysler, Avis, and other companies whose first goal, lack that of the Mojave ads, was to try to convince consumers that the product in question wasn’t awful. (And I’m still looking for examples online from A&P’s “Price and Pride” campaign, which used a couple of singing fictional grocers to tell shoppers that A&P stores were no longer grimy and soul-crushing.)

Read more at: Gizmodo

A Little More Freedom for Olympic Reporters
The New York Times is reporting that Chinese officials have loosened the censorship tactics that were preventing foreign journalists at the Olympic Village from getting through to sites like that of Amnesty International or ones that discussed human rights in Tibet. The loosening isn’t all that loose: Reporters can get through to Amnesty Internatinal, but not to sites that mention the Falun Gong. The story says that nobody knows whether the changes are permanent or temporary. It’s heartening to see the International Olympic Committee press the Chinese government to live up to its original promise of uncensored access–but once again, I keep coming back to worrying more about the 1.3 billion people in the country who won’t get to go home to a free Internet when the Olympics are over.

Read more at: New York Times

Technologizer » Olympics

NBC Using Authentication Wall for Olympics

The T-List: iPhone Tethering, BitTorrent Blockage, Phones in Flight