In the community of voices I follow online, one of the continuing themes is the narrowness and antiquated coverage provided by NBC(I launched into a screed on the topic this weekend).

I have also heard that many people are using the tools at their disposal (open proxy servers being the most notable) to circumvent the geo-location tools of the providers to view coverage from other national providers. I thought I would share some of my experiences with two of the providers, BBC and CBC.

BBC

Finding proxy servers in the UK turned out to be relatively simple, and I was able to get to the BBC site and view, with substantial performance penalties, some of the video on the site. This was a tactic I have used before, as I am a fan of English Football, and need to use this method to gain access to highlights and match-day broadcasts.

CBC

I am, well, disappointed with the lack of success I have had with the CBC. I hear from people in the homeland that the coverage makes NBC looks like the US is the only country in the Olympics, where the CBC provides a true global perspective. However, finding a proxy server that can fool the CBC video servers has been impossible. Therefore, I continue to not watch any Olympics at all.

I am sure that there are other means (P2P, Torrents, etc.), but I am finding that, well, I don’t care that much. It is the events in South Ossetia / Georgia, Zimbabwe, and other hot-spots that I am finding far more relevant to my day-to-day life.

So while I appreciate some of the challenges posed by circumventing the monopoly of the mind that NBC wants to claim, once that was achieved with the BBC, I found that I was in a So what? position.

But before I give up, has anyone had any success with getting the CBC feeds to work outside Canada?