Olympics Pirates
On Friday, after hearing about the awesome opening ceremony for the Olympics, I immediately went to NBC.com in search of the video. No dice. They weren’t airing it on TV until later that night, so they hadn’t posted it online yet.
Naturally, I turned to YouTube. Jackpot. 5 stars. Posted 8 minutes before. But wait! It was already taken down.
This is the scenario that NBC is hoping will play out throughout the Olympics, but will they succeed in pulling all the pirated content off the web? They’re certainly trying:
The piracy measures NBC is taking include digital watermarking to “tag” the coverage. An NBC spokesman said the network and its broadcast partners are tagging all the video that NBC originates from the Olympics.
That can help track offenders, said Russell Zack, VP of product management at Anystream, one of the vendors handling online and television technology for NBC’s Olympics effort.
“That acts as a forensic stamp you can track back to the last place it came from and it’ll give you hints as to what system it came from,” he said…NBC also has charged a handful of employees with scouring the Web every day to look for pirated videos from the Olympics. When those videos are found, the network will send a take-down notice to the site, NBC said.
They’re hoping they can channel online Olympics enthusiasts to their own impressive range of on-demand coverage. They’ve paired up with Anystream to deliver content across platforms, and their 3,600 hours of coverage over the course of the games will surpass the combined total of every other summer Olympics ever televised in the United States. We’ve blogged about NBC’s coverage before.
And it’s not just the American’s who are fighting pirated content. Chinese websites are also joining the fight.
