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Comment by caidh | Hacker News Reader

Because the US does not have well funded public television as the UK (the BBC) or Canada (the CBC) do. In the US, sadly, it is to the highest bidder that the broadcast & streaming rights go to. NBC paid $1.23 Billion for rights to the 2016 Summer Olympics, an astronomical amount.

They only provided streaming to those with cable packages above what is considered 'basic'.

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hotstar.com broadcasted Olympics free of cost in India. They aren't public funded.

Channel 7 here in Australia broadcast on 3 channels for free (with ads). They also offered free streaming on mobile devices for a range of sports and had a $20 deal for complete access to all content.

That said, they really annoyed me with the way they handled the time difference. They would open their prime time coverage with spoilers of all the previous day's events and then tell you which replays you could watch on the other channels later....

And the whole time the ABC news (Australian one) live stream was constantly being cutoff with "due to licensing restrictions blah blah blah". Sometimes for several minutes, I don't know if that was because of particular segments or just someone forgetting to switch it back on.

I pretty quickly went from casual interest to outright hostility to the olympics.

My friend once tried to watch a cycle race on BT sport's on-demand web player, to start the stream he literally had to click through a spoiler as to who had won. He was apoplectic, and has not used it since.

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