Whilst I snowboard, ski and now skate, I'm still not exactly the biggest Winter Olympics fanatic but something about hunting out the online streaming options appeals to me, probably because of the amazing NBC coverage of the Beijing Olympics.
This time around NBC opted to put their live streams behind a registration wall. You have to be a subscriber of one of the US cable networks, and have an online login to your provider's site in order to sign in to NBCOlympics.com. I poked around at faking a few of these registrations but gave up after a few attempts as most of them seemed to require a bill of some sort. One option that crossed my mind was to pay for someone in the US to have cable installed in order to use the online component of their subscription. To be clear I'm not that interested in the content but more so what's available and the technology. We'll come back to that idea in a sec.
Knowing that BBC has had great online streaming options for some time now I decided to see what they had. BBC are running 6 live streams which covers pretty much everything a regular punter like myself would want to watch. The downside seems to be that the streams are around 400 kbps, not the greatest of quality, but reliable.
eurovisionsports.tv
Eurovisionsports.tv streams to every country in the EU. They provide 12 EBU channels which are what I understand to be raw video feeds from various venues (i.e., no commentary). In addition they also provide access to 48 EU broadcaster feeds so you can stuff from Russia's Sportsbox, Slovakian TV and lots more languages I don't understand. :) Unfortunately I wasn't able to enjoy these streams as my crazy proxy setup was unable to sustain more than 600 kbps so the streams kept rebuffering. They serve these streams via Akamai. For the technically curious, there are 3 steps to their IP restrictions. The eurovisionsports.tv site itself will not serve you the appropriate HTML & viewer, the stream initialization performs another IP check returning XML with some sort of streamID and an authkey, and the stream itself further validates the request IP (it simply returns "closestream" if your IP does not match the authkey).
Getting access to the UK & EU streams was not very difficult. Its possible to buy a GBP5/month shell account and use that as a SOCKS proxy. If you're not familiar with this stuff you can use something like UK proxy server who provide full instructions on using a SOCKS proxy or setting up a VPN.
Finally to my home turf. I was curious what Foxtel are doing wrt online streaming but I am not a Foxtel subscriber. I coughed up $45 for the Olympics pack and added it to a friend's existing Foxtel subscription. The agreement was he watches in his lounge, I watch online. :) This won't work for everyone as it requires the Foxtel subscriber to hand over their username & password.
Foxtel
Foxtel is running 4 channels online, streaming via Akamai. The high quality live streams appear to be somewhere around 1.5Mbps and look pretty damned good. :) There's some initial delay when starting a stream -- it takes around 10s between clicking Play and the stream starting. I suspect this is due to the streams not being overly popular, and therefore the Akamai node I'm hitting (iiNet, my ISP) has to initiate a connection to the source stream.
I was going to look at the Canadian options but so far my Canadian web host has been somewhat slack to setup my account. :) I may update this post later.
