Olympic sport: NBC vs. the Net in “digital whack-a-mole”
Days into Olympics coverage, NBC continues to wrestle with unexpected competition. The network paid $894 million for exclusive rights to broadcast what is becoming the first Summer Games of the broadband era. Viewership is off the charts, nearly a 40 percent share. Traffic to NBCOlympics.com has already surpassed the 229 million pageviews from the entire 2004 Athens Games. And NBC has already served more than 11 million video streams. Still, ingenious webbies are creating newsfeeds and posting unauthorized video that dodge NBC’s tape dealys of some events and, in some cases, provide better quality video than NBC’s small-screen player.
NBC has asked Web sites to take down feeds and remove illicit clips. But some hackers have taken the warning as a challenge to breach NBC’s firewall, creating what The New York Times describes as “a game of digital whack-a-mole.”
Valleywag documents how legal and illegal clips are spiraling through the Web, even offering a how-to guide.
More on the Web competition at Waxy.org, TorrentFreak, and NewTeeVee.
