Olympics and Digital Rights Management

I'm not really a big Olympics fan. I don't particularly care to spend time watching entire events for the few moments that I might actually find interesting, so I sort of tune the whole thing out. However, the other day, I saw a news update that Shaun White just won the gold medal in the men's snowboarding halfpipe event. The news piece only included a picture, but I wanted to see the actual winning run - which only lasts about 30 seconds, so I searched Youtube for it. It wasn't there. Shaun's victory was only a few hours old - if that, so I assumed the footage hadn't been uploaded yet, and I moved on. A day later, I decide to check again but only found: "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by International Olympic Committee." Huh?

It turns out that the footage (which is worth checking out if you're interested in snowboarding) is only available here at nbcolympics.com. I was interested to figure out why it was so tightly controlled. I can't imagine how many Olympic videos are uploaded to Youtube all the time, monitoring the whole thing must require a huge amount of time and effort and I can't imagine it's worth the fight.

As I looked around for info on this, I sort of opened a can of worms. Apparently the Olympics and digital rights management has a history as long as the format has been around, and there are all sorts of issues. In previous Olympics, there were problems when social media would announce results and post information before the local NBC affiliates got a chance to run their tape-delayed prime time events due to time zone issues.

Before the Vancouver Olympics started last week, there was an issue with the death of a luger during his training run - this provided the kind of dramatic content that news and social media outlets can't get enough of.

The Olympics have yet to officially begin, but the first real "event" has certainly occurred. Georgian Luger Nodar Kumaritashvili has suffered a horrific crash in a training run, and the news, including video is being passed through the social web with exceptional virulence. The IOC, notorious for brand control, is attempting to pull down video of the event, but many videos are slipping through, as YouTubers furiously click the Yellow upload button to spread the content.

In his article for the Seattle Times Blogger Brier Dudley suggests the tightening of controls are simply a preview of what's coming from media companies as they explore ways to charge for online content.

Don't expect an online utopia, free from the shackles that networks, cable companies and the Olympics organizers put on event coverage. Although the technology for streaming video is getting better, it's also enabling content owners to apply more restrictions and controls to online video... For the first time, viewers will have to prove that they subscribe to premium-cable service to access "live and full-event replay video." During previous Olympic Games, you only had to provide a Zip code to identify yourself as a cable customer. This time, you've got to register for access through your cable or satellite company, which checks to see that you have a cable package that includes MSNBC and CNBC... It's basically the cable model extending to the Web, where improved authentication systems enable broadcasters to limit the really good stuff to paying subscribers. If this is what NBC does now, I can't wait to see what it's like after Comcast finishes acquiring the network.

As the internet becomes a more realistic alternative to cable television, it will be interesting to see where the networks and traditional content providers go with their digital rights management. I'm sure the music industry's precedent will alert content providers to the importance of content rights as cable becomes only one of a handful of ways to access this content.