The real use of the Olympics
The Olympics are a very handy way of seeing how the online world is moving along – check the rerun of the same events, every four years.
I’ve been looking back at the columns I wrote for Sydney (2000) and Athens (2004), and have compared them with Beijing in our latest newsletter.
On some things I was wildly optimistic (interactive television would be all the rage), and on other pessimistic (this wi-fi thing seems to have possibilities). But I did get one thing right, in the delicate area where commerce and technology collide. What, I wondered in 2004, would happen in 2008 if high quality broadband meant Americans could watch the games on the BBC, free of ads? The answer, as you may have noticed, is that they can’t because TV video streaming now tends to be restricted to the ‘home’ country. When faced with national interests the worldwide web gets a little less worldwide – there’s this, there’s Chinese censorship. There will surely be many more example.
Posted on September 09, 2008 10:29 by David | 0 comments
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