September 19th, 2007, 15 Comments »
Tomorrow I’d like to watch a crucial Canada-Australia football/soccer game at the Women’s World Cup. It’s being broadcast live (at the convenient local time of 10:45am–the tournament’s in China) on CBCSports.ca, but can only be accessed in Canada. The same is true of NHL hockey, which I’d like to watch this fall.
The CBC blocks the rest of the world from watching sports programs because they don’t have broadcast licensing agreements with other countries. That’s lame, but understandable. It’s frustrating, though, as a tax-paying Canadian who doesn’t happen to currently reside in Canada.
I’m looking for a relatively pain-free means of looking Canadian to the CBC’s Canucklehead firewall. I read through Boing Boing’s anti-censorware page, but nothing there seemed applicable to my particular problem. Any suggestions?
UPDATE: I’ve got a kind offer from a Canada-residing Canadian to offer his machine as a proxy server. Now I’m desperate seeking instructions and/or software which enables him to easily set up a proxy server thingy, and me to connect through his machine.
UPDATE #2: Meh. I got access to a Slingbox from another kind Canadian, but the connection speed was pretty poor on my end. Plus, sports are about the worst thing you can watch on dodgy Internet-powered streaming Web video. There’s fast camera movements and many small objects in motion on screen. Soccer is bad, but in my experience hockey is the worst.
Ultimately, the Canadian women failed to advance through to the quarter-finals. A disappointing result for our national team.
15 Comments »
September 14th, 2007, 8 Comments »
Caterina wrote a nice little essay about her failed soccer career, and ended with this charming anecdote:
They don’t let little kids compete these days, because it might ruin their self esteem. I see it all the time. A friend of mine at work said her 8 year old son played soccer, and one day he came home from playing and she asked him how many goals he’d scored. “There are no goals,” he said.
I don’t have much exposure to children’s sports. Parents, is this anti-competition streak common these days?
8 Comments »
July 27th, 2007, 11 Comments »
Discuss.
I think the comparison is fairly apt. Here’s why:
- I’m guessing the audience for celebrity gossip is 80% female, and the audience for sports news is 80% male.
- Both topics are pretty trivial, yet they have vast amounts of media attention.
- Both topics fetishize the tiniest details of their subjects: “Paris Hilton goes for coffee!” “Derek Jeter has a hangnail!”
- They both seem to feature the noble and the ignoble. Lindsay Lohan gets drunk and runs into things, yet Angelina Jolie is adopting most of sub-Saharan Africa. Michael Vick is running dog fighting rings in his basement, yet, I don’t know, Steve Montador is in Africa for Right to Play.
- Both topics feature individuals who make absurd amounts of money.
That’s why David and Victoria Beckham are so enormously famous–they’re a perfect storm of celebrity and sports (and, I should add, encouragement to middle-school dropouts everywhere). I wish it helped that one of them was actually good at something, but, as we know, talent isn’t a prerequisite for fame.
What do you think?
11 Comments »
June 13th, 2007, 9 Comments »
Via Neil, here’s an instant messager interview between the mysterious CBC blogger Ouimet and Andrew Lundy, senior producer at the newly-revamped CBCSports.ca. There’s some interesting discussion about the re-emergence of portals (no, duh) and the direction of the CBC’s online sports coverage:
The goal was to bring the whole CBC Sports experience online. Since our new agreements with sports bodies like the NHL, FIFA and MLS include video, we want to offer people that. And we want to be more interactive, so we’re beefing up user-generated content and forums, as well as adding contests and pools and games to the mix. The end result should be a complete sports experience, beyond the stories and stats.
The interview is too long. Why is there such an aversion to editing amongst bloggers and podcasters? I think it’s taking the whole transparency and authenticity thing too seriously if the reader (or listener or viewer) has to troll through the piece for the good bits. I blame Robert.
9 Comments »