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NBC’s decision to restrict live streaming of the Vancouver Winter Olympics to subscribers of cable, satellite or IPTV services is making many cord cutters scramble. We’ve heard anecdotes from former cable customers flocking to gyms or stop by friends for surprise visits while figure skating and hockey games are on TV. Even current cable customers able to jump through the authentication hoops of NBC’s Olympics may be looking for alternatives. After all, NBC is only streaming some 400 hours of the games in real time and once again reserving key competitions for broadcast TV, with some of them airing while many of us are stuck at work.

Of course, there are also other, slightly less legitimate ways to watch the games online. A number of web sites have been touting for weeks that they’ll carry live streams of the Olympics, and sports fans have been looking to P2P video clients for years to bypass TV pay walls. How easy to use are these services, and how good is the video quality? I decided to find out and give different ways of pirating the Olympics a try. Continue reading on Newteevee.com.

Tags: olympics, 2010winterolympics, vancouver, newteevee

This pithy and funny chart does a superb job of explaining how the insertion of a lot of “business model” (FBI warnings, unskippable trailers, THX vanity sequences) makes buying a DVD a lot worse than pirating the same disc online. I rip all my kid’s …

Dresden Codak’s “Artificial Flight and Other Myths (a reasoned examination of A.F. by top birds)” is a superb, spot-on critique of artificial intelligence skeptics (like, ahem, me), comparing the our arguments against the emergence of “real AI” to the …

Liz Gannes had an interesting post yesterday, in the wake of the Veoh bankruptcy announcement, with a great chart outlining the huge volume of funding that has flowed to video sites over the years and how that has panned out. As a document, the chart i…

People have wondered for years what Google might be up to with all that dark fiber it had bought up around the country. Now, we may have an answer: delivery of open-access, fiber-to-the-home Internet service at speeds of 1Gbps. That’s right: 1Gbps.

Google has just announced a trial run of its new scheme, and it’s asking city, county, or state officials to let it know if they’re interested in a pilot project. In its initial phase, the fiber optic network will serve anywhere from 50,000 to 500,000 people.

P2P is responsible for 19 percent of the traffic on global mobile data networks, according to a new report from network management vendor Allot Communications that my colleague Stacey Higginbotham is covering in depth over at Gigaom.com. Just for comparison’s sake: YouTube is causing 10 percent of the traffic on those networks, and actually 32 percent of all HTTP-based streaming traffic.

Does that mean that the blame game for congested 3G networks will finally shift from P2P to, well, everyone else? Not quite. From the company’s press release:

“P2P is the single largest factor leading to cell congestion which accounts for 34% of bandwidth utilization in the top 5% of cells.”

In other words: Areas that see a lot of mobile data traffic also see much more mobile P2P than the rest of the world.

mobile p2p around the world

The report itself also looks at how P2P and other forms of traffic are developing all around the world, and there’s one interesting tidbit in this comparison: Turns out that mobile P2P is not just the strongest in Asia (23 percent vs. 18 percent in the Americas), but that Asia is actually the only region where mobile P2P is growing, and doing so at the same pace as http streaming.

We’ve seen time and again that file sharing and P2P streaming are hugely popular in countries like China. It looks like that trend is increasingly migrating to mobile networks as well.

Tags: allot,, mobile, data, usage,, trends,, stats