Make Your Home a Champion Olympics Viewing Platform

What you need to know about this year’s Olympics. The 2012 London Olympic Games officially begin Friday, July 27, 2012. NBC has the exclusive rights to broadcast both on TV and online within the United States and U.S. territories. The information in this article is intended for U.S. viewers.

Outside the U.S., the International Olympic Committee itself will stream events live to dozens of countries on its official Olympics YouTube page, and TV coverage depends on local, country-specific networks. NBC also has promised to show 3-D coverage of the Olympics, generally one day after events take place. These high-definition, 3-D broadcasts will be available to subscribers of Armstrong, AT&T, Blue Ridge, Bright House Networks, Cablevision, Comcast, Cox Communications, DirecTV, Insight, Mediacom, RCN, Suddenlink, Time Warner Cable, Verizo, and WideOpen West.

To turn your home into the ultimate mobile Olympics viewing platform, start with this online NBC schedule.

Make sure you select My Time in the upper-left corner of the page. Now click on the big blue Get Ready button. Once you do that, you’ll see a button for selecting your TV provider, then a second button for entering the user name and password that you use with that provider. (If you don’t know or have a password, you’ll need to contact your TV provider to get one.)

It’s a good idea to spend some quality time with the schedule and click Alert Me for events that you truly do not want to miss. The site will send you an email reminder about a half-hour before each event starts.

Photo courtesy of Ian Patterson

Watch mobile-app streaming content on TV too. There’s no substitute for watching Olympic coverage on a giant screen. Sure, you’ll still want to watch the Olympics on TV the old-fashioned way. But this year, you can also use the mobile apps to switch back and forth — on your TV set — between live TV coverage and live mobile-app streaming coverage.

Do this by setting up “mirroring,” or some other method for showing mobile content on your TV.

The benefit is that you can use the mobile live app as a digital video recorder (DVR), which records every single event without any effort on your part. And if you’re not interesting in whatever event happens to be shown during regular programming, you can switch over to the live coverage.

If you have Apple TV, you can use Apple’s AirPlay Mirroring feature to watch mobile content on your big TV. AirPlay Mirroring simply plays on your TV whatever’s on your Mac or iOS device. Here are Apple’s instructions for using it.

People with Android mobile devices have a universe of options for playing mobile content on TVs. For example, some Android gadgets come with HDMI ports, so you can simply plug in the phone or tablet and play directly, as if it were a DVR. In general, the connectivity options on Android devices depend on the device itself, so check with your hardware maker to find out how best to do this.

If you have both Apple TV and Android mobile devices, you can use them together with an app on the Google Play store called AppleTV AirPlay Media Player.

The new online options for watching the Olympics potentially mean hundreds of hours of additional stuff to watch. Remember: Watching the Olympics this year is a marathon, not a sprint. So stay hydrated, remain flexible and go for the gold.

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