Tape-Delayed Live Coverage

Last night’s Olympics opening ceremony was really impressive. I know, I watched it live on TV.

So this morning I called my mom in California and asked her what she thought of it.

“Don’t know, we can’t watch it until tonight.”

“What? What do you mean?” I was incredulous. How on earth wouldn’t NBC broadcast it live like every other country on earth? “What about on the satellite dish?” I asked.

“No, couldn’t watch it. I even got up at 5 this morning [which would have been 8 pm Beijing time] and tried to see if it was on TV, but it wasn’t on, not even CCTV [the Chinese channel from mainland China].”

I went online to see why that would be. Wouldn’t you know it, NBC, which has the exclusive rights to broadcast the Games, had decided to delay showing the opening ceremony by twelve hours so it would be shown during prime time in the US.

Well, with the internet these days, people can just go online and watch it, right? Wrong! NBC has borrowed a page on information control from the Chinese government’s playbook. As this article on the New York Times described, NBC took down unauthorized videos of the ceremony from host servers and used geographic blocking technology to limit the best they could the number of videos that could be accessed from the US. The reason they cited was the $1 billion of advertising revenue at stake.

The Chinese government has gotten a bad rap for their internet censoring, their control of the flow of information for the purpose of maintaining political power. They have caught a lot of flak for it, and I think they should. But this is the first time I have heard of any organization in the West, be it governments or NGOs or corporations, so openly control the flow of information, albeit for a different purpose – commercial gains. Okay, the information at stake here is a show, not dissenting voice. But does it mean that it is okay to control the flow of information for commercial purposes, for profit? Is a corporation’s restriction on people’s access to information in order to gain commercial profit any more benign than a government’s restriction on access to information in order to maintain power?

I should have told my mom the little secret for accessing “unauthorized” websites I learned from local college students while I was traveling in China: proxy servers.