Comments on: No Olympics For Us

By: Ryan

Ryan — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:21:07 +0000

You just gave voice to my frustration. The only thing I really wanted to watch was curling, and it took me a few hours this weekend to figure out the myriad of ways I was being restricted from doing that. I'm a Time Warner subscriber, and I'm limited in exactly the same way: I have only the basic channels. Couldn't they set up a simple pay button for people who don't have cable? Like $15 to get the streaming and full replays for the two weeks? It couldn't be that hard.

By: Ab

Ab — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 20:23:31 +0000

We even have all the comcast required packages but still aren't able to log in. Even called comcast and they confirmed I should have access but they didn't know why it wasn't working. Still isn't! They are terrible.

By: Damon Cortesi

Damon Cortesi — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:48:14 +0000

Not to mention the website is a pretty darn frustrating experience as well. There's a 30-second ad before /every/ single video I watch, regardless of length. The player crashes my Safari browser. And yet, they went to the trouble of putting a "boss" button on the player that pauses the video and pops up a fake Windows Vista desktop. Really?!

To make it even worse, when I go to a friends place to watch (I don't have Cable TV either), the results of the races actually get spoiled by the damn news! Yup, before the delayed feed even hits, I've got newscasters telling me who won the events I wanted to watch.

By: Michael Hanscom

Michael Hanscom — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:10:25 +0000

I’m guessing that you don’t have a digital converter box.

We tried that -- matter of fact, we picked up two when the gov't was handing out coupons for 'em, and I've still got one (the other's been donated to Prairie's mom). Unfortunately, here in the Kent valley, reception is dodgy at best.

When I hooked the box up, we were only able to get a couple channels, and while I don't remember which they were, they weren't channels that we were particularly interested in. Theoretically, an external antenna might help, but as we're in an apartment building, that's not an option for us.

So it's cable or nothing (though there are some days that going back to nothing is really tempting).

By: Michael Hanscom

Michael Hanscom — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:03:20 +0000

NBC's made sure that CTV's video streams are blocked from U.S. IP addresses, and I'm not invested enough to try to the various means of jumping through hoops that Lifehacker's suggesting to get quazi-legal streams of questionable content and quality.

By: DeAnna Berger

DeAnna Berger — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 02:41:01 +0000

I read this as nate was ranting about the exact same thing. Today, he wanted to watch the cross-country ski events that were listed on the schedule for today, but as true for all of the nordic events, NBC was not going to be airing them. Actually, we heard somewhere what being only a couple hours away from the Olympics, if one were to just show up, you could buy tickets from a scalper and spend a fortune to see the events... unless you wanted to see the Nordic events. Those are no problem to get into. But that's an aside. So he took me to the hospital for a treatment and said, he'd track it down on-line later, and just discovered what you did. We don't pay for cable, therefore, no on-line converage from NBC. And we can't even watch the candian streams because we aren't in Canada!!!

But don't count out television all together. I'm guessing that you don't have a digital converter box. We got ours a year ago and plugged it in only to discover that we got more channels, with better reception, then what we were paying Broadstripe $20/month for, so we dropped cable. So without paying a penny for cable, we get around 20 channels including the major networks, several public broadcast channels, and several non-english channels. This is perfect. We tended to watch mostily PBS when we had cable. And the Korean channel is awesome when we can bring it in.

I guess we'll just have to rent the Olympics from Netflix after the fact, like we do everything else that it on cable.

By: Ryan Waddell

Ryan Waddell — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:47:08 +0000

Or there’s this lifehacker article as well:

http://lifehacker.com/5469488/where-can-i-watch-the-olympics-online?skyline=true&s=i

By: Ryan Waddell

Ryan Waddell — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:45:24 +0000

Can you get anything on the CTV (the Canadian network that won the broadcast rights this time) website?

http://www.ctvolympics.ca/?cid=sbtsn

I don’t know if they’re limiting to Canadians only or not.

By: Syd

Syd — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 16:03:38 +0000

Not specific to Olympics, but in general I'm with you on the cable and network disdain. We cancelled our cable a while back, it was juts outrageously expensive for an activity we really don't want to encourage (sitting around watching the boob-toob). I find dealing with Comcast, and even now Verizon my Internet/Phone provider to be like pulling teeth. Every time I talk to them the try to convince me to get back on the junk. They are pushers. And they have no shame.

By: AB

AB — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 04:54:35 +0000

I have the same problem, but according to the Seattle Times, you’d only be able to watch hockey and curling anyway: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/olympics/2011023126_olycanadiantv09.html