#NBCFail – Why I’m Streaming The Olympics From Canada

Yesterday I wrote an open letter to NBC on Medium.com that is getting a lot of attention. Since I wrote the post yesterday it has been read 1,300 times and the retweets and shares are continuing. The point I made in the article is that both me and Daina grew up absolutely loving the olympics. What we really like is watching all the different countries compete and we love to watch it live.

Since we are both so active on Twitter if we don’t watch it live it’s inevitable that we’ll see the results about 12 hours before watching the event. So pre-recorded doesn’t work for us. While NBC has a new “Live Extra” option it’s only available to cable subscribers with particular accounts supporting the NBCU channel, which we don’t have.

nbc-were-sorry

It also turns-out that even if you have the “Live Extra” option you’re still missing most of the events since it’s still heavily focused on US athletes. So we’re now using a VPN service to get a Canadian IP address and watching the Olympics live streamed through CBC in Canada. Unlike NBC, CBC allows absolutely anyone with a Canadian IP address to watch their live streams, and unlike NBC they have one 30 second commercial every 20 minutes rather than 20 minutes of commercials every two athletes.

In short, it has been awesome and we are loving all of the incredible coverage we are now able to watch. We cringe now when we turn on NBC and watch two athletes perform and then a commercial, then back to the NBC studio, then a flash of an event. It’s sad, and it’s ruining the Olympics for Americans who have less choices when it comes to Olympic programming than anywhere else in the world.

Look at countries like Canada, England, France, Lithuania, heck, anywhere and you’ll find they have live Olympic coverage for everyone to watch all day every day. On that note, it’s time to watch some more live events, and no, if you’re using NBC Live Extra you won’t be able to watch what we’re watching…

Want to read my post on Medium? Click here, and please make sure to click the “Recommend” button at the bottom if you like it. I’m closing comments on this post, if you’d like to add a comment please do so on the original article on Medium.com.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton