Of course, there are also other, slightly less legitimate ways to watch the games online. A number of web sites have been touting for weeks that they’ll carry live streams of the Olympics, and sports fans have been looking to P2P video clients for years to bypass TV pay walls. How easy to use are these services, and how good is the video quality? I decided to find out and give different ways of pirating the Olympics a try.

First, a word to the wise: We don’t recommend to try any of this at home. Not only are you bending the rules, but there’s also a very real risk of catching mal-ware while looking for pirated sports streams. Scammers have been stepping up their game in recent weeks, and countless web sites ask you to fill out surveys or install untrusted ActiveX plug-ins in order to access streams of the games. Please don’t fall for these tricks.

However, users willing and able to avoid these scams can theoretically get access to full coverage of the games online without NBC Olympics. Here’s what I tried, in the name of science:

Live streaming sites

Sites like Justin.tv and Ustream used be be a popular way to catch unauthorized relays of sports broadcasts. However, these days, most of these streams disappear as soon as they go up. Evan Solomon from Justin.tv told me that his company has been working closely with NBC for years on copyright issues, which led to the development of an instant take-down system during the 2008 Olympics.

The site is also using an automated filtering system, and these efforts seem to largely pay off: I was only able to find one live stream carrying a hockey game on Justin.tv, and that stream was so blurry that viewers in the chat room kept asking things like: “Who is winning? I can’t see anything!” Oh, and it also didn’t have any audio. I guess you can fool any filters if you make your feed unrecognizable. However, there were a number of feeds that promised to carry video from the Olympics, only to link to sites asking people to answer bogus questionnaires, and presumably install mal-ware on their PCs. For the record, I didn’t find any working streams on Livestream.com, Ustream or Stickam either.

P2P Streaming

Chinese P2P video streaming clients used to be a sports fan’s best friend, but the many have started to clamp down on unauthorized sports streams as well. I wasn’t able to find any live coverage of the games with TVUNetworks, PPLive or Veetle. But using the Windows-only StreamTorrent client proved to be much more fruitful, making it possible to watch the Women’s Hockey Game between the USA and Finland with around 300kbps without any significant buffering.

The bit rate wasn’t quite enough for a good full-screen experience, but a great way to follow the game while I was working – and I suspect that’s how many people will be using this. I also found a stream of a curling game transmitted with 941kbps, which looked great in full-screen mode on my 15″ laptop screen, but ended up buffering a little too often. It seems like there’s a number of fake sites set up that seem to provide StreamTorrent downloads but instead try to spread mal-ware or get you to buy subscriptions, but P2P sports forums seem to be a good way to avoid the worst pitfalls.

Torrent sites

Speaking of torrents: Sports fans have been busy uploading HD versions of pretty much all major competitions to torrent sites. These videos usually appear soon after the actual competition ends. I obviously wasn’t able to catch any of the action in real time this way, but I did get a nice, crisp HD recording of this week’s snowboarding finals — commercial free, no less.

Web proxies

NBC may skimp on its online coverage, but broadcasters in other countries are going all out with multiple simultaneous live channels, streaming every minute of the games in real time. Most of these sites determine by your IP address whether or not you’re allowed to watch the videos in question. However, there are numerous commercial proxy services that offer to tunnel your connection, in turn masking your country of online origin. I wanted to get access to the live streams provided by the BBC, so I searched for a proxy providing me with a UK IP address, and ended up going with a company that offers unlimited access for $9 a month.

What followed was a little bit of tinkering with the VPN settings of my Macbook, and blimey! I was British. Or rather my public IP address was, and BBC’s Olympics site provided me with the best video experience I got from all the approaches I tried. We’re talking about crisp, full-screen streaming with multiple live channels, accompanied by some nice gents making sarcastic jokes about the weather in Canada. What else can you wish for?

For the record, I also tried to get access to the streams provided by the Olympics website of the European Broadcaster’s Union, but couldn’t get the video player to work, despite being offered full access to all of the site’s static content.

Pirate picture courtesy of Flickr user Juliana Coutinho.

Related content on NewTeeVee: Where to Watch the 2010 Winter Olympics Online, Watching the 2010 Winter Olympics Online Around the World

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In fact, chances are that if you live elsewhere, your experience will be even better than that of many US-based sports fans. NBC is restricting access to its Olympic online programming to cable and satellite TV subscribers, and those granted access have to cope with lack of programming and a poorly designed web site. That’s not the case in many other countries, where online programming often complements, and sometimes even exceeds, the coverage of the games on TV.

First a quick tip: You can simply go to the IOC’s web site to find out who is streaming the games in your country. Just scroll down on the home page and find the “Watch Live Olympic Coverage Online” widget that provides a list of countries to choose from. Select your country of residence, and you’ll be automatically forwarded to a relevant web site.

That being said, the experience and depth of coverage varies significantly. Here are a few examples:

Canada: Canadian TV is obviously all over the games, and sports fans north of the border can watch simulcasts of ten TV stations online. Canada’s CTV is also featuring a number of online-only live streams on its site CTVOlympics.ca. The declared goal of Canada’s broadcasters is to have “every single moment” of the games available online. This exhaustive approach seems to be paying off: CTVOlympics.ca and its French-Canadian sister site RDSolympiques.ca clocked 133,472 hours of live video streams on the first day of the games. The opening ceremony caused nearly one million video views alone.

The U.K.: The BBC is covering the Olympics with four live interactive streams through its BBC Sport website. The Beeb’s iPlayer makes it possible to catch up on highlights of the game. The broadcaster wants to make a total of 2000 hours of Olympic coverage available online.

Europe and the Middle East: In addition to local broadcasters like the BBC and Germany’s ARD, the Olympics are also streamed by Eurovisionsports. Access is restricted to residents in some 50-plus countries, including Denmark, Israel, Turkey and Serbia via IP address localization. Eurovisionsports is aggregating coverage from 30 European broadcasters. The site also features six dedicated live channels, as well as a 24-hour Olympic news channel airing more than 3,000 hours of live event coverage, according to a press release from the European Broadcasting Union. A subset of the programming will stream in 720p HD.

Latin America: Terra’s various localized websites across Latin America are carrying a total of 20 channels that will feature 15 events of the Olympics with live streams.

China had its day in the sun with the 2008 games, where P2P TV services like PPLive delivered live video to an online audience bigger than that of any western web feed. The Vancouver Olympics are approached with a little more modesty. PPLive isn’t carrying the event at all, but CCTV-5 is covering some events live online, and its website features a number of on demand clips.

Related content on NewTeeVee:

Where to Watch the 2010 Winter Olympics Online

The NBCOlympics.com User Experience: Not Likely to Win the Gold

Related content on GigaOm Pro: Live Event Coverage: Video Rights Roundtable (subscription required)

Image courtesy of Duncan Rawlinson.

Apparently I wasn’t alone, as millions logged on to NBC’s online coverage of the games that summer. During the two weeks of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, NBCOlympics.com served a total of 75.5 million streams and 9.9 million hours of online video coverage.

But in 2008 I wasn’t a cable subscriber, so I was effectively getting access to video that others had “paid for” through their cable subscriptions — a practice that NBC will crack down on during the 2010 Winter Games. In 2010, NBC would restrict my access to that content because I hadn’t paid its cable partners for content that will be shown on CNBC or MSNBC.

Making matters worse is the fact that there’s an authentication process, in which those who actually do pay for cable must prove that they are subscribers through various methods (which differ by cable provider). When you log onto NBCOlympics.com and attempt to watch “exclusive video” on the site, you’re led to a page that looks like this: (Oh look! I could win a free trip to the Olympic Training Center!)

Now that I’m a Verizon FiOS subscriber, I should be able to access content on NBCOlympics.com. There’s just one problem — the site is asking for my Verizon FiOS log-in information, which frankly, I don’t remember.

While the log-in is apparently one-time only, and not nearly as onerous as installing the Comcast Access software for its TV Everywhere authentication, I don’t foresee myself looking for my FiOS password (or possibly resetting it) just so I can watch an on-demand stream of last night’s curling finals. And I suspect I’m not alone. For me and probably many others, online video viewing of the Olympics will be limited to what we can find on third-party news sites. For everything else, we’ll just set our DVRs, or maybe tune in to ESPN’s SportsCenter.

No doubt NBC will tout online video viewing as “record breaking” for the 2010 Winter Olympics, but it will do so only in the sense that the programmer didn’t really stream any video from the last Winter Games. Even so, you can expect more frustration and less actual viewers than you should for an event of this size.

Related NewTeeVee content: Where to Watch the 2010 Winter Olympics Online

Related GigaOm Pro content: Live Event Coverage: Video Rights Roundtable (subscription required)

Here comes the Internet to the rescue! NBC’s Olympics site will feature a number of live streams, but accessing them will be a little more difficult this time around. Luckily, there’s also going to be video coverage of the games available on other sites.

NBC Olympics will stream around 400 hours live from Vancouver. The live streams will for the first time be restricted to subscribers of cable, satellite or IPTV services, so you’ll be out of luck online if you don’t already pay for some kind of TV service. NBC also once again decided to show some key competitions on TV only, where its family of broadcast and cable channels will air 435 hours of live programming. Check this listing for a complete schedule of the competitions.

Users willing and able to deal with the authentication hurdles are actually given some innovative features. NBC Olympics uses Microsoft Silverlight for its live streams, and the Silverlight player developed for the Winter Olympics will offer slow-motion, fast forward and information overlays, as well as a live-blogging play-by-play of the event. Users will also be able to share select moments of the games on third-party web sites. However, don’t expect blogs to share hockey game highlights. Sharing will be restricted to non-competition content, so we’re all going to be able to watch press conferences and similarly exciting events.

Mobile.Nbcolympics.com will feature daily highlights of the events for mobile phone users.

Justin.tv is having a daily live broadcast with TJ Lanning and Resi Stiegler, two members of the US Ski team that aren’t able to compete due to injuries. The duo will broadcast live for 15 minutes from Whistler Mountain, where all the alpine skiing events are going to be held. The show, dubbed Live at the Lodge with TJ and Resi, is scheduled to stream daily at 6:30am PST / 9:30am EST, starting on the 13th.

Ustream.tv is going more for the glam side of the Olympics with a show called Live from the Club Bud Red Carpet in Vancouver. The NHL’s Heidi Androl and NBCOlympics.com’s Brad Blanks are going to cover the parties that are supposed to be the hot spot for athletes and famous sports fans alike live on the 19th and the 20th from 10pm to 11:30pm PST.

Yahoo Sports has started to offer lots of news coverage of the games on a dedicated Winter Olympics page. The page is currently featuring mostly archived footage, like video profiles of many major athletes, but it will also feature a live feed promising “fan interaction.”

AT&T Mobile TV and Mobi TV will carry the NBC Olympics 2Go channel with live video coverage from the games.

att.net/TeamUSA is scheduled to feature “exclusive Team USA On Demand videos,” according to an AT&T press release, but the site currently redirects to a Olympics-related music offering powered by AT&T. We suspect this will be fixed once the games go into full gear.

We will update this post with new links throughout the 2010 Olympics. Meanwhile check out Liz Gannes’ Guide to the Vancouver Olympics Online on GigaOm for links to relevant Flickr, Twitter and Facebook pages.

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YouTube’s Final Take From Movie Rentals: $10,709.16; the online video site’s first foray into the business of charging users to stream full length feature films was hardly a runaway success. (NY Times)

Level 3 to Deliver First-Ever Uncompressed HD Feed for Super Bowl XLIV; instead of sending the feed to a production truck for compression and delivery to the broadcast studio, an uncompressed 1.5 Gigabit per second feed will be sent from Miami to CBS studio headquarters in New York via Level 3’s fiber-optic network. (press release)

Verizon Preps Widescreen FiOS TV UI?; Verizon is making a variety of updates to its FiOS TV user interface, which could include adding a 16:9 widescreen option. (Zatz Not Funny!)

Ross Levinsohn Says Online Video will Become “Mainstream” in 2010; former digital chief at News Corp is looking to invest in online video because he believes it will become “mainstream” this year. (Beet.TV)

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As usual, the company is saving premiere events — figure skating and alpine skiing — for broadcast on NBC network, along with freestyle skiing, speed skating, snowboarding, and short track. Meanwhile, the various cable nets, including USA, CNBC and MSNBC, will have extensive live coverage of sports like ice hockey, the biathlon, and curling. But none of that will be live online; instead, the remaining 400 hours of live coverage on NBCOlympics.com will consist primarily of events like bobsledding, cross-country skiing, the luge and snowboarding.

The situation is similar to what happened during the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, when NBC touted more than 2,200 hours of live Olympic coverage on NBCOlympics.com and a total of 3,000 hours of on-demand video. In that case, the remaining 800 hours were events that were scheduled for live broadcast on NBC and the company’s cable networks. (Unfortunately, NBC didn’t take our suggestion to get rid of tape delays for online video.)

The big difference between the 2010 Winter Games and the 2008 Summer Games is that this year, NBC plans to tie online access to its coverage of the events to an authentication scheme that will determine whether or not users have a cable subscription. So live, streaming video at NBCOlympics.com will only be available to those that have paid for cable access.

So between the lack of live events online and the authentication scheme, you can expect that a number of users will seek alternative ways of finding Olympics video, just as they did in 2008.

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So it’s become Feher’s job to get the message out as to how Conviva can help media companies to deliver better streams by using some of his own experience. “Content companies often have no idea how often they get an interrupted play,” Feher said in an interview with NewTeeVee. “When you get to 1 million concurrent streams and more, there’s often a large percentage of streams that have problems.” On average, he said that about one-quarter of streams have some form of streaming problem or another, whether it be buffering, high levels of latency or just plain jittery video quality. So how does Conviva help?

According to Feher, the company’s “media delivery platform” is designed to help its customers provide the highest-quality video experience while also managing costs and offering real-time analytics into how live streams are performing. By inserting a piece of code into the video player, Conviva gets feedback from the client that allows it to adjust how streams are delivered — including which content delivery network is used and at which bitrate — based on the amount of bandwidth that’s available at any given time.

An improved viewing experience can have a big impact on user engagement. Feher says that viewers without problems tend to watch video for, on average, 30 percent longer than those with any kind of buffering. That seems to fit with recent research from TubeMogul, which found that 81 percent of online viewers click away if a video stream buffers just once.

So far, the reaction to Conviva’s platform has been positive, according to the new CEO. In the past 60 days, he says the company has been in discussions with a dozen “highly recognizable media brands” and sports leagues to deploy the technology to their own live streams.

Conviva has been around since 2006 and has raised a total of $29 million, including a $20 million financing round last year led by UV Partners, New Enterprise Associates and Foundation Capital.

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Today, the U.S. Olympic video tech team is being formally named (though we’ve written quite a bit about some of their participation already). Here’s the full roster:

iStreamPlanet is taking the live video feeds from NBC in New York and feeding them through the stream preparation process. Inlet Technologies‘ Spinnaker will encode each stream into six different bitrates for Microsoft’s IIS Live Smooth Streaming and send them to Microsoft’s Windows Servers. Akamai will deliver and cache the content around its network. Viewers will tune into a version of the Silverlight player customized by Vertigo, which brings in a data feed from Deltatre for play-by-play and stats. Conviva contributes monitoring software to immediately report any issues with the streams to NBC and Microsoft.

While Akamai and Microsoft are established giants, that’s mostly a list of startups, which seems fitting given the Olympic spirit of amateur competition. From what we’ve seen, these companies are the best of the best in live streaming.

What does that mean for viewers? In addition to a more stable platform, higher quality video (full 720p) and a better experience provided by adaptive bitrate streaming that adjusts to fluctuating bandwidth conditions, streaming improvements over the last Olympic Games in Beijing include features such as fast-forward, rewind and slow motion capabilities and the ability to jump to key moments within an (on-demand) stream. There will be 23 different video feeds: nine venue feeds, four broadcast feeds, one Olympic News Channel, six “Beauty Cams,” two victory ceremonies and one press conference.

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