Month: January 2014

For those of you who have forgotten about this (and are paying attention to the drunken escapades of another Disney-raised pap star, this is the season for the Winter Olympics, and as this is a non-divisible by 4, but even numbered all the same, year, it’s the time for most of us to dust off our parkas and our national flags, and sit around the boob tube to watch a select few people do what most people dream (typically while downing shots of vodka)

I, however, am not one of those people.

Now I know what you’re all thinking: “Oh, he’s going to launch into another pro-gay blog rant”, “He’s only boycotting because of Russia’s human rights record”, etc. While these are certainly very valid reasons to protest the Sochi games, my decision was made 2 years prior.

During the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, the US broadcasting rights holders, Comcast-owned NBCUniversal made multiple faux-pas, starting with their decision to tape-delay the broadcast without providing a live feed, hiring the insipid duo of Matt Lauer and Meridith Viera, Bob Costas’ constant slagging off of every other country (hosts included), but the final straw was during the tribute to World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, when the insipid duo couldn’t be bothered to even look him up on Wikipedia.

The next day, I bought 2 month’s prepaid access to a UK VPN and started streaming the Olympics from the BBC’s website. I do not make this decision lightly, but after a 12 year monopoly with no end in sight (the IOC awarding NBC the games through the 2020 Tokyo games), the only way to ensure that anyone other than Comcast-owned entities get a chance to broadcast the Olympics is to starve Comcast of the ad-revenue it receives.

As the BBC is barred from airing commercials, it is an acceptable substitute for Anglophone listeners who want to stick it to commercial broadcasters. However, it is barred from offering service to non-UK IP addresses due to rights issues. Purchase of access to a UK-based VPN gateway is required. The best list I can think of can be found on TorrentFreak.

Regardless of your reasons (Fear of watching a terrorist bombing stuff, Russia’s appalling human rights record, over-commercialism, Comcast’s poor-quality coverage), I encourage all of you to not watch, or if you must, buy a VPN and watch it from the BBC’s website (just piss on the Russian flag if you feel dirty afterwards).