5 Ways Jamaicans can bypass CVMTV and Watch the London 2012 Olympics

Posted by Ingrid Riley

This Olympics Games 2012 in London, is NOT the time to mess with a Jamaican’s television or Twitter feed. We have great expectations from our fantastic athletes in this our Jamaica 50 celebrations. So we are glued to the Olympics Games on television at home, work, bars, restaurants…everywhere, for the live action and chatting it up with friends on Twitter before, during and after races.

Thankfully Twitter has us covered, so there will be no fuzzy feeds, audio missing, ads or lottery draws at crucial times Games times. This has clearly been the experience of Jamaicans as they have been shackled to the CVMTV station who have the exclusive rights to to rebroadcast the Games in Jamaica.

Ordinarily Jamaicans would have had no issue with CVMTVs exclusivity if the broadcast feed was on point and of the quality that was keeping us happy.

Instead, Twitter and Facebook has been rife with tweets and status updates about the awful coverage they are being given, making even the the most patient and levelheaded serve up R rated rants.  The situation got so unbearable, that the The Broadcasting Commission issued a notice of breach of licence to the TV company, complaining of “poor to very poor” coverage and have ordered  them to “immediately” improve its coverage of the London Games.

Unfortunately, and I say this with a restrained self and pursed lips, CVM’s chief executive, Al Edwards, in a Jamaica Observer article CVM blasted for “poor” Games coverage rejected the criticisms, saying they were “unjust and unfair”. He said further that ” the signal was bad when it arrived on the island. “We don’t determine what comes through that feed,” said Edwards. “We don’t have cameras in London.” And my response to that….WTH…KMDT..SMH…oops sorry went into a Twitter lingo rant there.

Edwards went on further to say that “CVM acknowledged its breach of license and gave an undertaking to work assiduously to improve coverage and that prior to the Games had increased its coverage of the island from around 60 per cent to over 70 per cent with new antennas and more powerful transmitters.”

That’s nice!
While they are working on that and clearly thinking we are all just waiting on them, let’s try and sort you out, the 100m final is this Sunday goddamit!  Here are 5 ways ( in the order as I got them) you can watch the Games by bypassing CVMTV as crowd sourced by people in my network on Facebook and Twitter. As we Jamaicans say, pick your choice and run with it. It’s all online but you can always hook it up to your TV with a few cables. This is 2012 the consumer has choices and so we do what, exercise them.
5 Ways Jamaicans can bypass CVMTV and Watch the London 2012 Olympics
1. Bit Torrent, you may not get it live but you get it. http://www.bittorrent.com/
2. Alternatively, setup or sign up for a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service such ashttp://strongvpn.com/ and watch it on BBC. Everyone is update with the live feed from this year’s Olympics from the providers.
3. If you’re tech savvy or knows someone who is, setup OpenVPN in EU West on AWS or London on Rackspace and you should be fine to watch BBC live broadcast of the Summer Olympics.
4. The simplest way to get it online is finding a US site streaming and getting this easy to use addon for FF, did a small tutorial on it sometime ago. I’m currently streaming tennis from NBC Live Extra: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNddEHQ_GUQ
5. Guy go get a coupon from https://www.facebook.com/GKMSonline/app_174239392688467 … they are giving away coupons so you can watch the SportsMax live stream online. So far the experience has been pretty good… clean video with channel options. And as one of my friends said “The only ‘catch’ with the Sportsmax Olympics code thing is that to get the code you have to use their Facebook app and give them ur email address (although it didn’t verify that it was a real email address, so you could actually give them a fake one). Small price to pay in order to bypass CVM.”
DO you know of anymore. Let me know. Add the info as a comment please so we can share it.

While you are setting yourself up for some Olympic viewing pleasure this weekend, check this out.

 

Jamaica was 3rd in the World in Tweeting the Olympics last weekend

AdWeek in an article The Twitter Olympics: 5 Surprises Number of tweets for first day tops the entire 2008 Beijing Games By Christopher Heine had Jamaica at #5 with “Cool Tweetings. Despite ranking 141st in population among world nations, Jamaica is being extremely well represented on Twitter. The Caribbean country ranked only behind USA (190,000 tweets) and Great Britain (180,000) in terms of the number of tweets in support of their athletes over the weekend.

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