Live Internet Television

As people discovered in ‘08 with the Beijing Olympics, it can be hard to watch what you want live online, even if it’s heavily promoted as being “live online.” To protect its TV ad revenue by keeping viewership up, NBC made sure that a lot of its live online content was not available to US customers (Silicon Alley Insider).

With the upcoming Vancouver Olympics, NBC is trying something a little different (Media Daily News):

The system, tabbed “Olympics Online Connect,” allows people to prove via an authentication process that they pay a provider for TV service. That measure opens the gate to more than 1,000 hours of live Olympic streaming and full-event replays.

“TV Everywhere” is a concept designed to prevent customers from dropping their pay TV service if the same content is available online gratis.

This is exactly the kind of mindset — in effect, keeping people from accessing the content they want by making it too expensive in a bundle — that ivi seeks to make obsolete.