sleepcamel.net : brad weikel

I won't get into the political reasons, but I've been trying to take a very small personal stand and boycott the Olympics (*cough* *Free Tibet* *cough*). However, for a sports junkie like me this is extremely difficult. My main strategy has been to go MLB.com instead of ESPN.com for my daily fix. However, technology has conspired against me... but it has also saved me.

First, how technology conspired to make me watch the olympics...

I'm not sure if its a Firefox bug or just something cracked out on my computer, but every so often Firefox leaves open some sort of thread to ESPN.com. Usually in the middle of the night, when I'm trying to sleep. Anybody who uses ESPN.com is probably familiar with my pet peeve with the site ... the fact that video ALWAYS starts up when you go to the front page, often shocking the hell out of you because you've just cranked up the volume in iTunes. Anyway. Every now and then, in the middle of the night, my computer will start blaring audio from ESPN. I'll scramble over to the computer and turn off my speakers, and usually go straight back to bed. But sometimes curiosity gets the best of me, and I wake up my screen to see if Firefox is open. It isn't. Somehow, with no browser open, my computer finds a way to blast the latest sports news at me when I least expect it.

Anyway. That's how it started. I was mad at ESPN for waking me up in the middle of a wonderful night of Vicodin-induced sleep (I threw out my back last week . . . I swear . . .), so in the morning went back to the site to try to figure out if there was some way to turn off the autoplaying of video, to fix the problem for good. While I was there, quite naturally, I read a few headlines, and saw that there had been a pretty killer Men's 4x100 relay, which the US had won in an amazing come from behind victory, by a mere .008 seconds.

There's no harm in watching one event, right?

How copyright and technology conspired to support my Olympics boycott...

So I clicked around on ESPN, watching every video with the words "Phelps, Lezak, or Relay." I watched 15 minutes worth of commentary and interviews before I realized that ESPN doesn't actually have any footage of the competition. Oh! That's right! This is the Olympics, and the TV networks kick into SuperCopyright mode during events like this. So NBC has exclusive US broadcast right and is hoarding video clips and ESPN is just playing the scraps.

No problem. I'll just hop over to YouTube and *what?!* People have been trying to upload it to YouTube, but it keeps getting deleted for copyright infringement! I've seen this before, on a handful of videos, but never so thoroughly that you can't find a copy of a recent clip. I can't find it on Google Videos either.

So finally I cave and go to NBC.com. Their site, as expected, is ugly and hard to navigate but, fortunately, they've pushed the relay clip to the front page of their Olympics coverage. So I click on it and wait for it to load...

...and I'm prompted to install Microsoft Silverlight. Well, it's safe to say that this opensource software developer is not going to install Microsoft Silverlight on his MacBook, so that's the end of the story. I guess I'll never get to experience the magic of Lezak's amazing finish, but I can thank NBC and Microsoft for helping me boycott the Olympics by putting so many tight controls on their content.

Normally, this type of proprietary information closure would really get under my skin -- and, frankly, I do find it upsetting that NBC & Microsoft have clearly conspired to use this huge media event to try to get lots of low-knowledge users to mindlessly install Silverlight -- but in this case I'm delighted that, by being evil, they reminded me to tighten up my own moral commitments.

Finally, it's worth pointing out that only 0.2% of Olympics viewers are watching exclusively online, and only 10% are combining online viewing with TV viewing. Gee, do you think that has anything to do with them using a proprietary tool that few people have heard of and even fewer have installed? Hmm.