Like a lot of people I talk a big game about my dislike of the Olympics, until they start to actually happen. I haven’t been following it avidly, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested. The following probably says a lot more about me as a person than I’d like to admit, but since the Olympics have started, watching the Korean coverage of the event just hasn’t been enough. Too much archery, too many Park Tae-hwan replays, and frankly, just too many Korean gold medals. I’ve been searching for more.

It started Sunday night with the U.S./China men’s basketball game, which I knew wouldn’t be broadcast in Korea despite the fact that it was clearly the only interesting thing happening at 9 p.m. that night. So at around six I started looking — first sitting in my chair as usual, then, as I became frustrated and more intent on my goal, I started hovering above my chair, as if to save my back from some kind of repetitive stress.

Let me cut to the chase. What I’m trying to get at here is that I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time trying to pirate the Olympics. I can’t watch the NBC Internet feeds because I live outside the U.S. Little did I know I was descending upon a war that’s often times much more interestingthan the Olympics themselves.

At the top of the pyramid is NBC, which paid nearly $1 billion for the rights to the Olympics. In paying so much money the network has become determined to rule every corner of it’s investment, most notably tape delaying events both on the TV and the Internet. This, in turn, has sent even more people scrambling for other options.

People like me, although my situation is a little different because I’m trying to avoid the Korean feeds. Mostly, I just want to be able to keep tabs on all the baseball games as they happen. I’d like to watch some of the basketball games, and if possible, I’d like see some of the other non-Korean events as they occur.

After several hours of finding dead links to streaming video, how-to-articles about finding streaming video, I finally found this site, which was streaming as many as 32 NBC television feeds on three screens. That is, 32 channels of Olympics with no commentary. It was brilliant. I watched the basketball game Sunday, and dabbled in a little bit of everything on Monday.

Sadly, today it was taken down. I tuned in today to find an NBC logo and something about the stream being stopped. There are several other sources and even guides on how to go about finding streams, but those are often gone by the time I take the time to follow the links.
I just don’t have the heart to spend several more hours looking for feeds, so I’ve done the reasonable thing and tempered my interest. But with baseball tomorrow I don’t know how long that’ll last.

Corporations still don’t have much idea on how to handle the Internet. NBC paid a lot of money, so it can’t help but want to control every aspect of its investment, even though the buzz being created by the pirates will likely lead to increased ratings in the case of the Olympics. In the meantime people like me are kind of screwed.

At least I’ve got my Alriyadiah Saudi Sport Tv. The picture is crap, but better than nothing. Tee hee.