The Olympics -- live, taped and on demand

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By the time I woke up this morning in Southern California, the anxiously awaited, cast-of-thousands, fireworks-filled Beijing Games opening ceremony already was over. So I sipped my coffee and made due with e-mail accounts from colleagues on the ground in Beijing.

I talked to my mother by telephone a little while ago. She lives in Ohio, where they’re already watching NBC’s prime-time TV coverage of the opening ceremony -- programming that is still about an hour away in Southern California.

Rather than settling for being three hours behind Mom, I turned to NBCOlympics.com, where I’ve been watching a live video stream of the Olympics competition from the equestrian venue in Hong Kong -- where it’s already Saturday morning.

Nobody ever said that watching 1,400 hours of broadcast coverage (on NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, USA, Oxygen, Telemundo and Universal HD) along with 2,200 hours of online coverage on NBCOlympics.com was going to be easy.

To hear NBC Universal tell it, this will be the Olympic Games during which online streaming video comes of age -- not to mention real-time updates delivered by text messaging and live streaming direct to your cellphone.

Time will tell. For a decade, frustrated fans have been hoping that someone would figure out how to use the Internet to let them get their fill of the many Olympic sports that merit little or no coverage from NBC.

Fans of, say, dressage, which is what I’m watching right now. Dressage is the part of the equestrian competition where the rider puts the horse through its paces in a ‘harmonious demonstration of the horse’s three natural gaits: walk, trot, canter.’

So what does it take to watch all of the Olympic programming that is being streamed online?

I have a clunky old desktop that runs Windows XP, hooks into the Internet through the telephone company’s DSL and has the modest amount of software required to stream video from NBCOlympics.com.

And what do you get online? The NBCOlympics home screen has all of the sports listed on the left side -- with ‘live’ icons that appear when competitions are being streamed.

The video I’m watching live from Hong Kong has no expert commentary or talking heads -- save for the one-line descriptions that you can scroll through at the bottom of the NBCOlympics.com screen. There also is a play-by-play tab and a few other bells and whistles that I’ll play with later on.

There is an open microphone that picks up the event loudspeaker, occasional applause from the audience, the rhythmic clip-clop of hoofs and occasional banter between the competitors.

This is a network feed, so when the network breaks for commercial, you get tractors grooming the grounds, event workers in red vests scrambling back and forth and a bird’s-eye view of the facility from a camera that’s apparently perched atop a nearby building.

That might appeal to my mother. When I asked her how NBC’s network television coverage started out, she wasn’t too happy: ‘So far it’s just two guys talking to each other and a lot of commercials.’

Updated at 7:30 p.m. The equestrian feed ended a bit after 7 p.m., but within minutes, online viewers had their choice of women’s basketball, badminton, fencing and weight-lifting.

-- Greg Johnson