Olympics 2004 on Usenet
A couple weeks back I predicted that Bittorrent would be a big way to share coverage of the Olympic games when fans felt their local TV coverage fell short, and I admit I don't see much in the way of bittorrent sites listing olympics videos at this time. But I did notice some action on Usenet, especially the newly formed alt.binaries.olympics. Just a couple days into this year's games, a rip of the BBC's opening ceremonies was floating around along with a few basketball games.
Andy Baio has the full scoop with a link to a sample of Brazillian TV coverage from last night's coverage, along with a full listing of what the usenet group currently has posted.
I knew the demand of fans for their favorite sports would take the Olympics online this year, whether or not the IOC wanted it. But I guessed wrong on Bittorrent being the place to be, it turns out the old school Usenet network is where the action's at this time around.
Personally, with a two-tuner DirecTiVo and season passes with the highest priority set to record any and all Olympics coverage, I'm getting way more coverage than I expected. I've been able to see just about every sport in the games and aside from the same old "triumph over adversity" montages before every event an American is going to win, the NBC coverage has been great.
Do you think that NBC has arranged their broadcast schedule around 2-tuner TiVos? I've manually scheduled recording of just about every program and I've only run into a conflict between Olympic broadcasts once in 10 days.
Posted by: Lindsey Smith | August 25, 2004 at 09:51 AM
It also turns out that Italian and Chinese live web feeds are rather easily accessible. The Italian one is a very nice 512k WM stream.
Posted by: Scott | August 25, 2004 at 02:18 PM
Scott, could you please direct me to those feeds? Thanks...... isai76 at gmail.com
Posted by: Isai | August 26, 2004 at 12:00 AM
I don't know why you folks in the US are putting up with coverage that is delayed so long. Here in Canada all of the main events are shown live, not held until primetime the way NBC does it. There have been several articles in US newspapers talking about the superior coverage that the CBC offers vs. NBC.
Posted by: Wayne | August 27, 2004 at 10:43 AM
The CBC has the best coverage of any of the Olympic broadcasters. It especially puts NBC to shame. I had my pvr constantly recording the CBC, and I never missed an event. Now if only we could get TiVo up here.
Posted by: Andrew Escobar | August 30, 2004 at 01:57 AM
It is not illegal to import TiVos to Canada. You just have to "roll-your-own" guide data which isn't too hard. I have two series 1 TiVos and I live in Canada using Rogers Digital Cable.
Posted by: Wayne | September 01, 2004 at 08:49 AM
One thing that did end up on BitTorrent was 'The Dream In Athens', the comic round-up done by Aussies Roy and H.G. Thanks to a couple of encoders, the entire series was up within days.
Posted by: nick | September 13, 2004 at 03:49 PM
Where do I go to download the dream?
Cheers.
Posted by: Glenn | June 26, 2007 at 02:42 AM