NBC Crows About Thwarting 45,000 'Illegal' Olympic Videos, Ignores The Fact That It Drove Users To Them

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the gold-medal-inconsistency dept

Aside from a now-traditional lack of enough live coverage, pretty awful commentary, a ridiculous over-abundance of a strangely limited rotation of ads, making Bode Miller cry and Bob Costas’ double eye infection, NBC did a pretty good job covering the Winter Olympics, right? NBC certainly believes so, even though it seems that many Americans found NBC coverage so immensely annoying, they went to great lengths to install VPNs so they could watch Canada’s version of the games instead.

What has NBC achingly proud, however, is the fact that the company cleverly worked with Olympics officials to prevent viewers from trying to access the games via non-sanctioned NBC streams and online outlets. According to NBC, the company worked to kill off some 45,000 videos of Olympics competition, and an estimated 5,000 live streams (they avoid showing their math or any historical context for those numbers):

“Officials estimate that 20,000 videos of Olympic competition were kept off YouTube, either through filtering technology that prevents them from being posted in the first place or locates and takes them down shortly after they are added. Another 20,000 were stopped from distribution on similar video-sharing sites popular elsewhere in the world, like Dailymotion in Europe or VK.com in Russia, NBC said.”

Right, well, good job I guess. The problem is that while NBC was busy waging their proud war on Olympic videos, they were simultaneously engaged in practices that were driving users to those same viewing options. While NBC did offer some live streams on their website, they were largely restricted to customers that only pay for cable, as part of the industry’s lame “TV Everywhere” mindset (a mindset that increasingly doesn’t seem to be doing much of anything for anybody, including cable). Worse, even some paying TV customers, like those paying for Comcast’s new HBO, basic cable and broadband bundle, weren’t allowed to watch the streams because they weren’t buying expensive enough TV packages.

To hear NBC tell it, this kind of absurd inconsistency in policy is all a perfect example of how when NBC and sanctioned friends work together to be inconsistent, it results in online perfection:

“When all the players in the digital ecosystem cooperate and work together, it is possible to create an online environment in which legitimate commerce thrives, jobs are created and consumers receive content how, when and where they want it,” said John McKay, NBC spokesman.”

A real gold medal performance all around, NBC. You really stuck the landing.

Filed Under: olympics, piracy, streaming, vpn
Companies: nbc