How To Watch The Beijing Olympics Online

As the start of the Olympics draws near this list of tips on how to watch the Olympics online at Silicon Alley Insider should come in handy.

Last night my wife and I spent about an hour scouring the next two weeks of listings, setting up every recording we could find for our favorite sports (me: road, track, mt bike, and bmx cycling events, her: swimming and soccer). I noticed that even with an upgraded 750Gb drive in my TiVo, recording dozens of 3-to-8 hour blocks of HD programming is going to max out our TiVo if we don't stay on top of it and watch/delete every couple days during the next two weeks.

Having the chance to see things live online will be a nice addition to that as well, in the cases where events we like are tape delayed until primetime.

Comments

[Chris]

There are a couple of free olympic streams here. I’m checking out TVUPlayer too to see what I can find on there.

http://www.webtvhub.com/how-to-watch-beijing-2008-olympics-online-legal-pirate-methods-for-free-live-action/

[Nick S]

The big problem with the NBC streams? No commentary, apart from someone sending text updates. While there's a Zen calm to some of that, it really reminds you how much certain kinds of sports coverage rely upon expert framing to point out what's going on.

The BBC has fewer streams at slightly lower quality (five or six at most, I think) but it does have commentators either onsite or at the IBC in Beijing. For the minority sports that I enjoy most during their Olympic exposure, and which really don't get much attention from NBC, even on the cable nets, that's essential. For instance, I've been loving the judo, where the competition moves really fast, one bout coming within minutes of the last, but it'd be incomprehensible without commentary.

Still, there are relatively few overlaps for dual-tuner peeps, which means that combining streams and judicious use of the fast-forward (sorry, beach volleyball, but... eew) I've been able to get a good mixture of live and spoiler-free taped coverage.