I've been in love with big media lately. First I spontaneously complimented the LA Times on a stellar A-section yesterday. Then I've been gushing about the wonderful olympics coverage (the online stuff in particular is awesome -- I got offered free tickets to a softball game in CT when I emailed the guy doing play by play commentary/liveblogging). Now I should point out how awesome Hulu is at managing to provide user-desired content that doesn't anger rights holders. Huzzah to the multinational corporations who give us the circuses we need to take our minds off the world's troubles. Huzzah I say!

I'm curious to know why you emailed an Olympic softball liveblogger.

Last night I was watching the US play Canada -- it was a shocker, as they were behind 0-1 in the 4th, and this is a team that in their games thus far had no-hit both opponents, and last time had a combined score of 63-1 on their way to an easy gold medal (no team other than the US has won gold in softball, btw). But then there was a rain delay. I was curious to see what would happen, since unlike tv coverage the internet coverage has had no commercial breaks or breakaways when the action stops. Sure enough, we got some shots of people walking to cover, and then a static shot of the rain-covered field for hours while we heard the music piped in over the PA system. Occasionally someone would wipe off the camera lens. And the liveblogger kept going.

I knew from watching badminton in this way previously that the livebloggers are a bunch of folks stuck in a control room in Stamford, CT, watching the live feed 30 seconds before the internet sees it and posting. And I'd been meaning to compliment someone on nbc's overall great and thorough coverage, but it's hard to isolate a single contact point through such a huge organization. These guys are the little people that make it rather entertaining and they have almost no visibility, plus I'm sure the softball guy was mega-bored, so when he invited email I figured it was as good a chance as any to actually compliment someone directly.

But can you imagine? Sitting in a room in Stamford in the middle of the night, typing furiously for a handfull of fans who may or may not even care about your commentary specifically? This sounds like a low-paying labor of love for aficionados of their particular sport, so I'm glad to give them a moral boost. If you agree with me, turn on dressage or judo tonight and give the lowly liveblogger a shoutout!

It's definitely not awesome that, from what I can gather, I have to have an intel mac to watch online; and, from what I can gather, NBC is doing a good job of keeping clips off youtube.

yeah, i am off the bus too. i've never seen such tight-fisted copyright control - and this in an area of international spectacle, much of which takes place when americans are SLEEPING. i think it's rather disgusting that nbc doesn't offer older events streamed for PC & Mac on the website, instead of a few hand-selected ones they're constantly rebroadcasting anyway.

Jesse, Silverlight is available for PowerPC macs, though only version 1.0. I don't know if 2.0 is required for this.

Flea, I'm not sure what you mean about a lack of older events -- I can watch everything that's been aired online. For example, right now I just loaded dressage from August 8. Also, sure, they're exerting copyright control, but consider how much more available these games are, both online and on air, than ever before. Back in the old days we only had whatever was aired on NBC. In 1992 they had that whole pay-per-view debacle. Now I have the power of their website, plus at least two and sometimes up to five simultaneous channels of HD coverage that I didn't have to pay more than the cost of cable for. That is a tremendous improvement over anything I've seen before and given how much the games cost to produce and televise, I would say it's practically a gift.

Okay, they don't want clips on youtube, but that's hardly the most tight-fisted copyright control ever seen. Look at what MLB does -- they also keep their stuff from getting onto youtube, plus they have creaky software, everything costs money to watch (sometimes quite a lot of money), and that's just one sport with rather limited appeal. And MLB is only rebroadcasting existing broadcasts -- you pay for the privilege of listening to the WRKO Red Sox feed or NESN, annoying commercials and all.

And as a final shout-out to big media, it seems to me that the commercial breaks are a lot shorter than what I'm accustomed to seeing on televised sports. Plus, no commercials at all online.

Thanks for the tip, Jon- it's possible that I didn't work hard enough to stream footage. When I went to the NBC website and tried to watch, I got a popup window indicating that all my mac options required intel. I'll have to go back and see if I can make it work.

I'm not sure comparing presentation of the games to that of other professional sports is necessarily a lot to recommend it by. I don't have cable, and with the internet being what it is, in my perfect world watching the olympics online would be as easy as pie. I would even tolerate an advertisement or two- I'm sure there'd be a way to make plenty of money without, for example, blocking my obvious routes to calling up a replay of the men's 400 IM. But your point is well taken. Fuck big media.

Here's the thing, though -- doing all this streaming in an efficient way that doesn't cause huge network blocks, doesn't lag, etc. isn't cheap or easy, and making it compatible with the myriad setups out there is even harder. Thus my expectations were low. I didn't expect free online content at all and since so much of the world runs Windows, figured that would also be the only supported platform. So I was surprised when my Mac (albeit, a very recent and up-to-date Mac) was able to handle it all, and doubly surprised when everything worked well.

There are issues -- Silverlight isn't made for linux, though I hear there are ports. My computer is relatively loaded -- 2.6Ghz Intel, 4 GB ram -- I imagine a more average computer won't handle things so well, and maybe instead of a corrupted image the app will just die ungracefully. The marquee events still must be watched on TV, and being on the West Coast, this means a time delay. To add insult to injury the rebroadcast I'm watching is labeled "Live".

But this is so so far above anything I've seen before that it continues to blow me away. More great things include the "stro-motion" highlights of the men's floor routine and the underwater camera-only coverage of the mens' IM swim.

The "stro-motion" thing is rather cool.

"To add insult to injury the rebroadcast I'm watching is labeled "Live"."

That's been annoying me as well. Isn't there a legal issue with misrepresenting their West Coast coverage as live?

big media