TV coverage of the Olympics

There is a new day dawning in TV coverage of the Olympics.

For years, the chief complaint of viewers has been how little of the Games (winter or summer) were actually shown live on American television, especially on the West Coast when all prime time coverage was delayed three hours. The tape delay problem reached its zenith during the 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics when some events were being shown almost a full day after they took place in Australia.

But this year, it will be different with every event in every sport being carried live -- at least online -- with NBC video streaming 3,500 hours of competition over the Web and on mobile devices. It's a vast expansion of an experiment during the Vancouver Winter Olympics when the network streamed hockey and curling live on its website.

And it's free, although you do need to sign up -- which is something you should do now before the Games really get going.

For your smart phone or tablet, just download the NBC Olympics Live Extra app (again, it's free). If you want to watch from your home or office computer, go to www.nbcolympics.com/LiveExtra.

Now, here comes the catch: You have to receive your television signal at home via cable (locally, Comcast), satellite (DirecTV, Dish) or telephone (AT&T) and you have to subscribe to a digital tier that includes MSNBC and CNBC (almost everybody does). If you get your TV signal the old-fashioned way, overair, you are out of luck.

But presuming you're a cable-satellite-teleco subscriber, you then go to a drop-down menu and choose your provider. You will have to enter the user name and password that corresponds to your account. (Comcast immediately recognized me when I signed up on my home computer and immediately signed me on.) Many, if not most, subscribers have an email account with their provider. If you don't, you will need to contact your signal provider.

Once you're in, you're in and you will never have to sign on again.

So, how's the quality of what you'll see?

Well, I watched parts of the U.S.-France women soccer's game and a couple other soccer matches live on Wednesday morning through my home computer (a Mac), a borrowed iPad, my iPhone and my office computer (a standard PC). The feed was great on the iPad, very good on the Mac, clear and crisp (if small) on the iPhone and a bit jerky on my office PC. The gadgets (ranging from replay to multiple screens) are cool although, as you might expect, the PC/Mac website has more of them than do the mobile devices.

If I had to pick one, I'd go with a tablet since it looks good and has enough size for easy viewing (the smart phone is, of course, small) and you're not anchored to your home or office desk.

Of course, how things will work when NBC starts streaming as many as 30 events at a time and millions of viewers have logged in remains to be seen. We'll just need to let the Games begin.

Contact Charlie McCollum at  408-920-5245. He will be monitoring television coverage of the Summer Olympics over the coming days. Read his stories at www.mercurynews.com and follow him at Twitter.com/charlie_mccollu.