PEER-TO-PEER OPTIONS – Backdoor Access to Olympic Footage

If you want to move beyond bite-sized recaps and highlight reels, P2P sites are your best obtions for backdoor access to unedited blocks of 2008 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 (Just enter them in your Google or Yahoo search).

• isoHunt, Mininova and EZTV. These are top BitTorrent sites. Miss the opening ceremonies? Or the four-hour finale of table tennis? Try downloading torrents of popular Olympic events.
• 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.
• TVants. This is a P2P Internet TV, which requires a free download. TVants can run on Windows or on Linux's WINE.
• PPMate. A Chinese P2P Internet TV network download. PPMate only run under Windows.
• 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.

Now here are other options that you can explore:

• Truveo and Blinkx . Catch Olympics videos from all different news channels in one place. Some sites like blip.tv also allow you download videos.
• Beijing2008.cn - This is the official portal for Olympic Games that hosts a large collection of videos, photographs, interviews with players from different countries, Olympic Game logos, history of the game, and other interesting material. You may want to visit for regular news about the games.
• CNN , New York Times, BBC UK and Yahoo! Sports. Other than video sites, most media websites have dedicated section for Olympics Games which also feature medal counts and breaking news from the Olympics.

ADOBE FLASH POWERS CCTV.COM'S BEIJING OLYMPICS’ INTERNET COVERAGE

In China, CCTV International Networks Co, Ltd. has teamed up with Adobe to bring Olympics online video to mainland China. CCTV.com owns the online video rights to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games for mainland China and Macau.

Choosing Adobe as a partner is a indication that Chinese Internet viewers and sports fans can expect a rich, immersive interactive Web experience. CCTV.com's Olympic Network TV Station, through Adobe technologies, including Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex, will bring the drama and excitement of the games to the Web.

CCTVOlympics.com, will deliver viewers with:

• An unprecedented Web experience created with Adobe Flex and delivered via Adobe Flash technology, which includes Olympic results, statistics, comprehensive bios, rules and expert analysis from CCTV's Olympic media team. Unlike NBC though, CCTV is not eschewing commentators and replacing them with bloggers, although, it also will be diving into the social web via "social networking features that will enable fans to share aspects of their Olympic experience with friends."
• 5,000 hours of on-demand protected streamed video content (3,800 hours of worldwide broadcast Olympic Games video and 1,200 hours of CCTV’s own video) including full event replays, highlights, features, interviews and encore packages.

Over the past year, CCTV International Networks Co, Ltd. has developed new media platforms based on the most advanced Internet technologies. By teaming up with Adobe, CCTV.com can provide sports fans and consumers an engaging online experience for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games and beyond. Adobe was chosen as the partner because Adobe technologies enable the TV network to deliver a compelling Web 2.0 experience consistently to people across platforms.

Besides the Olympic Games, CCTV.com and Adobe will pursue other initiatives to develop new media based applications leveraging CCTV.com's brand and content and Adobe's advanced technology platform.

ONLINE VIDEO COVERAGE: Viewing Olympic games as never before!

The Beijing Olympics 2008, the world's largest sports event, has begun placing on litmus test currently available Web technologies with online video coverage. The cyber-pipeline infrastructure has been effectively set up to allow viewers to download any event to watch on their personal computers for free. That’s any event on their personal computers . . . for free. Wow!

The sole U.S. broadcaster for the 2008 Summer Olympics Games in Beijing, NBC has teamed up with Microsoft for 3,600 hours (17 days) of live streaming coverage on NBCOlympics.com. With USA Network, Oxygen, MSNBC, CNBC, and Telemundo to the mix, as well as high-definition coverage on USA HD and Universal HD, the prospect of quality viewing entertainment has become clear. NBC will make use of the Internet to "send out mass quantities of video in high resolution". NBC's online coverage will be powered by Microsoft Silverlight and Windows Media Player. Limelight Networks is being used to route the video streams to Internet service providers.

The only down-pull is that the coverage will only be accessible to users in the US, since that's where the Web technologies are installed to support such extensive online video coverage, and it’s where NBC has rights to broadcast the Olympics. Despite the geographical restrictions, NBC is promising loads of 'new media' features in its Web coverage. These include:

• The ability of users to watch whatever sport they want and when they want to, unlike on TV where they get what the broadcaster dishes up. They can choose from the all the available live and background footage, and watch whenever it's convenient with the enhanced Silverlight Player.
• Getting the best and brightest Web video experience around with amazing, clear, crisp video no matter what the bandwidth is. Silverlight makes the most of your internet connection without the exasperating wait for what you want.
• 3,600 hours of "on-demand encores of full events and highlights". That means NBC will be covering 28 sports, 302 events, and will be broadcasting seemingly 24/7.
• · Switching between up to 4 live streams. Yes, sports fans can view 4 events simultaneously with picture-in-picture controls. They can customize the media player to capture their favorite events!
• Seeing the standard world feed that is sent to all broadcasters, so there will be no network TV commentators. Instead, the NBC expects to see bloggers "serve as play-by-play voices and analysts".
• Access to statistics, biographies and other information. Viewers can get expert commentary, dynamic statistics, play-by-play captioning and athlete profiles...all at their fingertips.

Well, does these sound too good to be true? Oddly, “NBC Olympics on the Go” is considered to be only available for the Microsoft Vista operating system and then in just two editions — Home Premium and Ultimate. This somehow implies that millions of XP users, not to mention Mac and Linux folks, might be left on the sideline. Maybe the Vista thing has something to do with Wavexpress, an Internet video distributor whose media platform, TVTonic, will be used to distribute the Olympics video online. TVTonic already provides 350 media channels through Vista.

You could check this out for yourself.