Like many of you, I was looking forward to watching the 2012 Olympic competition taking place in London. Since I enjoy watching some of the more “obscure” sports (e.g. fencing, rowing, etc.) I was prepared to go on-line and watch these events (replays, actually) on some website, or other.
Unfortunately, it seems that NBC cornered the market for on-line viewing of the Olympics. Worse, you can only view these events if you are a cable television subscriber (which I am not). This didn’t seem right to me so I wanted to voice my concerns to NBC. But, being the sneaky bastards that they are, here too I was foiled.
Like all good net denizens, I scrolled to the bottom of the NBC Olympics home page and looked for a Contact Us link. It was there. I clicked the link and I was taken to a ContactUs page. So far so good.
I entered my concerns and got the “submit” portion of the page where I was greeted with the now-ubiquitous Captcha. Except that there was no image displayed, just the input box (or in .NET programming-speak the TextBox control). Ha Ha!! Very funny NBC. So I reloaded the page, figuring that it was probably some quirk. It was… I think. This time I saw the captcha image and dutifully entered the digits display on-screen only to be greeted with the “doesn’t match” error message.
“Double Damn!” I thought and proceeded to re-re-load the page. Once again, the image was missing. After several re-loads I got the Captcha image to display and once again I wrote out my elegant complaint about how NBC has corrupted the spirit of the Olympics, typed in the Captcha digits and clicked “Submit.” Once again, “… doesn’t match…”.
So for now, NBC has won. I will be forced to watch whatever sports NBS deems that I should be able to watch from my local NBC affiliate. No fencing, no rowing, no weight-lifting.
This isn’t proper. I will be contacting my U.S. Representative (although I doubt there’s anything the FCC can do). I’m still working out how to voice my displeasure, but nonetheless, I will voice my displeasure, if only here.
Oh, the irony.
I’m having this same problem. I wanted to complain about how they got exclusive rights, but none of their online live feeds will actually play.
Complaining about their poor decisions is the reason why Guy Adams got his twitter account deleted. This must be their way of ensuring that they get no further complaints.
rj