Someone really should point her to the right video codecs, no? That or let her know what kind of hardware requirements are necessary for viewing of HDTV clips. Funny she wasted that much time and couldn’t get it to play at all. But it is funny she turned to BitTorrent to leech Olympics coverage she couldn’t get in her own country, well at least not on delay. NBC’s 36 hour old (at time of airing) HDTV coverage is just plain pathetic. While the visuals were nice for the most part, it was like watching a historic footage rather than new-age media. It’s bad enough NBC pushes all the good events to primetime (starting at 8pm), but adding a day to that just makes me feel like I’m in the ‘40s or something, where they used to film a boxing event, then show it in theaters across the country weeks (or is it months?) later. Movies, soap operas, heck, even reality TV, we’re used to it not being live or not having to see it the minute it airs or premieres. But sports, well, sports is the one thing where if it ain’t live, it’s almost not worth watching…
—-
European broadcasters moved into the age of live streaming video with the 2004 Summer Games, while NBC stayed behind. Why did the Peacock network shortchange U.S. Internet users?
My first download using BitTorrent file sharing took several hours, 80 megs and turned out to be 8 minutes and 34 seconds of NBC HD audio coverage of the historic men’s 200 freestyle race; apparently the video code got scrambled in the process. The three torrents of the BBC’s broadcast of the Opening Ceremonies totaled 2,100 megs; part one took more than seven hours to download and I still couldn’t watch the video on any of three viewers. Loved the sound of those British voices, though.
http://ojr.org/ojr/business/1092974988.php
