The Olympics

Unless you've been living in a cave for the past week, you would know that the Olympics are going on. And unless you got a lot of free time, you're not going to be keeping up with it, so what can you do?

Well, due to the advent of online television, it's now really easy to keep up (which I should do... didn't even watch the opening ceremony yet...).

1. NBC Olympics: The official broadcast network is ramping up their internet broadcast, they even created a special domain (http://www.nbcolympics.com/) for their Olympic coverage. I don't really like the website though... it's messy (image below) and requires Microsoft Silverlight to work (which is a hassle because I'm not a big fan of Microsoft).

2. Youtube-like sites: Youtube is constantly being policed by online copyright people, so you can't really go there, but other rip-offs:

• Veoh 
• Metacafe 
• Dailymotion 

might have Olympic events on their sites (though it might take a bit of digging...).

3. P2P - I'm not going to try to explain (I'm not even sure how this works myself...), so quoting from ValleyWag.com:

P2P Streams: The way I'll be watching online will is through MyP2P, a site that catalogs live sports and television streams from around the Web, listed by event. It helps to run Windows, though not necessarily Vista, because many streams require software downloads — check out MyP2P's beginners guide for tips, including where to find software downloads and optimization settings. I ended up finding live BBC coverage of the opening ceremonies via Justin.tv, which ran just fine in my browser. If you can't find the channel you want in the media format you prefer, check wwiTV, TV For Us, TV Channels Free, Channel Chooser or BeelineTV among others. 

Pros: Free and fairly easy once you've installed most of the media players listed by MyP2P. And it's fun to watch coverage from other countries — I'll be watching all my football with spanish-speaking announcers whenever possible. 

Cons: Quality is hit-or-miss, stream links come and go, and you have to think ahead in terms of scheduling to make sure you've got all the necessary programs installed. Also, Mac users will want to install Windows XP through Parallels or Fusion for the widest selection of channels.

Enjoy.

-runiteking1

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