If you’re not an official broadcaster, it can be tricky covering the Olympics, as Fairfax’s scribes were reminded yesterday.

An all-staff email reminded everyone that they weren’t allowed to embed or retweet any Channel Seven posts with video in them during the Olympics.

“The reason for this is Fairfax can only post a certain amount of Channel 7 video a day. Any embedded posts count against this total amount of content. This also means we cannot embed Channel 7 YouTube videos.

“Digital journalists, please check any Olympic content on your sites that may carry Channel 7 social video posts.

“If in doubt, leave it out.”

Crikey’s heard of similar briefings going on in other newsrooms. As we noted in our pieces on the Olympic broadcast restrictions a while back, even videos within the daily allowance have to expire in 24 hours, which means for many outlets, the work just isn’t worth the payoff (we’ve got a fairly comprehensive list of all the broadcast restrictions here).

SBS isn’t one of the official Olympic outlets, so SBS2’s The Feed has asked its viewers how they would like to see it recreate Olympic footage using other means. Cats videos, claymation and requests for the team to reenact events using interpretive dance were some of the suggestions.

In New Zealand, where the fight for access has been rather more acrimonious this time, a battle is due to commence in the High Court this afternoon after Fairfax NZ and NZME used video from the Rio Olympics Sky NZ has the rights to — Sky NZ is seeking a court injunction.