[English] Watching the Olympics via the Internet

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Watching the Olympics via the net:

 http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Watch_the_Olympics_Online

Live Internet Streams and On-Demand Highlights:

(US) NBC Olympics. Media giant NBC has exclusive rights to broadcast the 
Olympics in the United States, and will serve up four live streams and 
3,000 hours of on-demand video online. 

TV Tonic. NBC paired with Wavexpress to offer event highlights on demand 
via a download service similar to iTunes. For Windows Vista users only. 

YouTube. Starting Wednesday, Google will provide approximately three hours 
of content each day from the Olympics Broadcasting Service on a channel 
dedicated to the games. The content will include highlight reels and daily 
wrap-ups, but no live coverage. The footage will be available in 77 
territories, including South Korea, India and Nigeria, that aren't 
officially covered by Olympic sponsors, according to an International 
Olympic Committee press release. 

CCTVOlympics.com. CCTV will be supplying more than 5,000 hours of Olympic 
Games coverage for mainland China and Macau. 

BBC Sports. The U.K.'s official Olympics broadcaster will offer six 
streaming channels showing coverage from BBC TV and BBC News Interactive. 
Channels will focus on on-demand daily highlights and athlete interviews. 

Yahoo7. Australia's official Olympics online portal offers live streams, 
video coverage on-demand and behind-the-scenes interviews, specials and 
features. 

CBC Olympics. Canadians can tune into the Canadian Broadcasting 
Corporation online for supplemental live streams, video coverage on-demand 
and behind-the-scenes interviews, specials and features. 

Getting Around Location Restrictions:

In most cases, users in the United States will be blocked from viewing the 
footage on the non-NBC sites. But you may be able to view clips or streams 
from other countries if you use a proxy server located within that 
country, or if you can otherwise trick the streaming server into thinking 
you're from a country where it's allowed. 

There's some advice on this topic at Metafilter. There are also paid 
services like Anonymizer that can do the trick for you. If you have any 
additional advice, please add it here. 

Peer-to-Peer Options:

If you want to move beyond bite-size recaps and highlight reels, P2P sites 
are your best bet for backdoor access to unedited blocks of Olympics 
footage. Additionally, content is likely to be available sooner than the 
12-hour delays expected with some of NBC's coverage. Try these web 
workarounds for full access to the Olympics. 

BitTorrent. Miss the opening ceremonies? Or the four-hour finale of table 
tennis? Try downloading torrents of popular Olympic events. Top torrent-
tracking sites to try include isoHunt, Mininova and EZTV. Need a quick 
primer on using BitTorrent? Read our How-To Wiki entry on the subject. 

Veetle Stanford University's experimental web TV platform requires a 
downloadable player, but offers live broadcasts of soccer games, 
basketball and more. 

Sopcast. This free P2P internet TV player requires a download, but offers 
a wide lineup of channels broadcasting the Olympic games. 

TVU Networks. This P2P internet TV player requires a free download and 
only works with Windows, but is a good resource for watching global 
sporting events online. 

This wiki page was last modified 23:40, 6 August 2008 by snackfight. 
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Cheers, Bryn
Stephen Loosley
Victoria, Australia