NBC Sports App Brings Olympics to Xbox, Samsung Devices

The catch is you must watch everything in real time.

It’s nearly here. (Well, technically it is, since the soccer kicked off on Wednesday, but let’s not split hairs.) The Rio Olympics officially gets under way on Friday, and if you enjoy watching sport on TV, you’re in for a real treat. That means no late nights waiting to see if the USA nails the pommel horse. Of course, NBC will be airing replays aplenty throughout the two weeks.

Every Olympics on NBC inevitably establishes a new record for volume and breadth of coverage, and this year’s numbers for the Rio Games are both staggering and unprecedented: 6,755 hours over 11 platforms. That’s 356 hours of Olympic stuff per day spread over multiple NBC-owned channels. Bravo will feature tennis; CNBC has a number of events including volleyball, cycling, and wrestling; MSNBC counts rugby and water polo among its sports; Telemundo will broadcast hundreds of hours in Spanish; and United States of America will carry more basketball, along with beach volleyball, rowing, synchronized swimming, and more. According to NBC, all the negative stories about Zika and pollution and everything else have raised awareness of the 2016 Olympics and the results have been great for the bottom line.

Digital video fans are in luck: The NBC Sports iOS and Android apps offer real-time streaming coverage of many Olympic events. Please see our terms of service for more information. If you don’t have a cable TV subscription, that’s OK because there are plenty of other ways to get your Olympics fix. Instead, first you need to get a free Playstation Network account.

“The research from London continues as well, which is that people who were willing to have all these devices on watching the Olympics, actually watched more Olympics on television than people who just watched the Olympics on television”, Bell said.

A cheaper way to watch the Olympics without subscribing to conventional TV services is to use either the Sling TV or Playstation Vue Internet TV networks. Then after trying both, keep the one you want, or cancel both – there’s no contract, and no long-term commitment. He said he’ll take future Olympics on a “case-by-case” basis. And NBC Universo, which will feature soccer, is available in a $4.99 additional Spanish-language programming package ($3.99 for PlayStation Plus members). Sling works on Apple TV, Roku, Xbox One, Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV, mobile phones, tablets, and computers. Tell us what you think should be the best, legal way to stream the Olympics come 2020 in the comments.

No problem. Just go to NBC’s athlete bio page. Sling TV recommends about the same. “MTP” recently had its most-watched July sweeps since 2008, so political junkies will presumably be disappointed when they tune in for Chuck Todd and instead see Bob Costas. Google is putting Olympic Games searches front and center.

Asked if NBC will make it clear the announcers are off site, Bell said that “whether they’re outside in a TV (trailer) calling it off a monitor or high above the field of play looking at it off a monitor or happen to be 6,000 miles away in Stamford calling it off a monitor, I mean, it’s a courageous new world. people are on Facebook Live and things are being live-streamed all the time on Periscope”.

-NBC will offer specialty channels for basketball and soccer, with 779 hours of content.

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Finally, Microsoft’s Bing will be offering similar services to Google, including a well-designed schedule which is a good alternative to NBC’s overwhelming schedule of events.