Foxtel's iPad app is the gold standard of Olympic coverage. Hopefully, we'll see similar on all TVs in the near future.

It may come as a surprise to some, but arguably the best Olympic coverage in the world came from Australia. There was just a small problem, you had to have a full Foxtel subscription and an broadband-enabled iPad to access it.

The superlative Foxtel Olympic iPad app should act as the template for future coverage of Olympic-like events and hopefully, sooner rather than later, the coverage that it afforded will be what everyone is watching on their smart TVs in NBN-era Australia. But there are a few issues to overcome first.

Foxtel had an app?

Yes, and even I only heard about it by accident. It showed all eight dedicated Olympic TV channels and allowed you to pause and even record them on your iQ box at a press of a button. The best part was the catch-up section which provided on-demand coverage of every single event and even allowed you to jump to key moments within it - for instance, a crash within the cycling road race, or a certain round in the diving. It also made it facile to locate Australian competitors and watch special, behind-the-scenes coverage. I can't think of a bad thing to say about it beyond the fact that you couldn't pay separately to access it. A superb effort and the truly the gold standard of Olympic coverage. However...

Cost

If you wanted to get access to Foxtel's Olympic coverage in July you'd have needed to pay over $2000 for a two-year subscription [UPDATE: actually a six month special was (and is still) running here which reduces the minimum figure to around $500. My apologies. However, the point still stands.] more if you wanted HD channels - plus another $400 for an iPad. Plus installation fees. That's quite an ask if you just wanted to watch the Olympics. If you had a new Samsung TV you could pay $50 for a month's access with no contract. You'd need a good internet connection and you couldn't pause or record anything, but it worked well enough. Otherwise you could get by-the-month coverage using Foxtel on XBox, which had similar issues.

If you were like me you'd have watched the countless Foxtel sign-up-with-no-contract ads in June and a distant switch would have flicked from "ignore ad as usual" to, "hang on, it's the Olympics next month, and I can spend a couple of hundred dollars getting a temporary two-month subscription."

Some basic mental arithmetic ensued which illustrated how a few of hundred dollars was probably cheaper than the cost of a new TV and a new window pane. And vocal cord surgery and a coronary.

Channel frickin' 9

It didn't take long for me to realise that I'd made the right choice. Within hours of starting, the first rage at Channel 9's soul-crushingly diabolical coverage was hitting the interwebs. It was only matched by the noise coming out of America regarding NBC's horrendous coverage. Both networks seemed to be having a competition to see how much contempt they could generate from their captive audiences.

Foxtel users, who could hide no more when it came to the Closing Ceremony and Channel 9's exclusive coverage, would have still witnessed some Channel 9 spoilerific, superlative-ridden, banal reading of notes but we also learned about Eddie McGuire's kryptonite - he shuts up when there are bands playing: a stellar reason for setting all sport to music, moving forward.

Those with a bit of tech savvy headed off to watch the excellent BBC coverage - a lesson on how to broadcast the best of the Olympics on a single channel. However, this was hardly ideal as it was tricky to record anything and most people would have been stuck watching computer screens rather than their TVs.

The people versus cable coverage

It's likely that many people will have had their first taste of copyright infringement and piracy with these Games. For one thing, despite supposedly being the 'Social games', which featured social networking prominently in the opening ceremony, actually using social media while at the Olympics was banned. Those rules didn't seem to interest many people though.

Then there were the countless Aussies and Americans who would have known someone watching illicit BBC coverage during the Games and eventually got involved too.

It all highlights how not all copyright infringers are pirating criminals and that many people simply had no other way to watch the Olympics. It also demonstrates how little normal-people care about following rules dictating what people can and cannot share with friends and family.

Game of Thrones again

It's an age old problem. Earlier this year, HBO's hyper-popular Game of Thrones series became the most downloaded/pirated TV show ever (with Australia topping the list of international perpetrators). That's because the only way of watching it, as it appeared, was to have a full US cable subscription (US$50 per month) plus an HBO subscription (US$15 per month). Everyone else had to wait and see if their local broadcaster would show it any time soon.

Or, they could simply download it free from Bittorrent in just a few minutes.

Faced with no other choice, this is what literally millions of people around the world did and still do. Many weren't happy about the lack of options and literally begged HBO to take their money so they could watch Game of Thrones legally - primarily through allowing subscriptions to their web service without having to pay for cable. An online petition got popular but was quickly shot down by HBO saying "No thanks."

Indeed, cable-based companies like Foxtel and HBO make a fortune through exclusivity. It's not yet clear how many sign-ups Foxtel would have got through their Olympic coverage, but it's likely to be a lot and many of them will now stick with Foxtel long-term. I'm almost-ashamed to say that I'm one of them - the system works.

Real social coverage

In the UK certain sporting events are mandated to be shown on Free To Air TV: Wimbledon, The FA Cup Final and the Olympics being key examples. This is in order to not deprive kids and those-without-deep-pockets access to key sporting moments. It's unlikely that such a scheme will appear in Australia any time soon though, meaning many kids will be stuck growing up with Channel 9-esque coverage (one highlight I noticed was Nine's airing of two hours of marathon running instead of a stunning rhythmic gymnastics final and one of the greatest badminton matches of all time in the men's final which aired simultaneously). [UPDATE: this isn't true - sorry! - there are many events guaranteed to be shown Free To Air in Australia as pointed out in the comments. Somehow this makes things more depressing though.]

If everyone had access to good broadband and Foxtel embraced the potential of one-off event marketing to people that are never going to be interested in subscribing to cable TV, it's possible that we'd see coverage similar to Foxtel's iPad app appearing in living rooms across the nation (I can't think of a sports fan who wouldn't want it having tried it). But that's a big 'If'.

Another hope is for global rights to be bought by YouTube which offers similar access online. Noises have been made about doing this for years, but the amount of money involved to secure such rights would be astronomical. Could the IOC sell online rights separately? Or would it diminish the value to traditional broadcasters? After all, Sony is just one TV company which has said that most television will be watched online in three years' time.

In the meantime, many people will have little choice but to seek their coverage using illicit means. It would be refreshing to see more government members acknowledging that the likes of AFACT can't have everything their own way by criminalising anyone who doesn't pay them for content that might not even exist in some markets. But, as we've seen with Malcolm Turnbull, there is at least some hope in that regard.

It will be interesting to see if there's any fallout from all of the dodgy downloading of Olympic coverage - whether media industries turn a blind eye to it or try harder than ever to lock down content next time round.

Hopefully, sooner rather than later, a happy middle ground will appear and interactive, multi-stream online TV will be embraced.