What is the the best way to stream the Tokyo Olympics?

June 16, 2021 7:45 PM

In the past we've had a cable subscription and Tivo. This let us record the Olympic events we were interested in and watch them, skipping the commercials. The last part is key, I'm willing to pay to not watch commercials. We have an Apple TV and Playstation now and no cable subscription. We could sign up for cable again and use a DVR, but it seems like there should be some way to stream the events we want while still skipping commercials.

Hulu Plus, Youtube Live, Sling, Peacock, or... ? Which service will carry the most events while sill allowing us to skip all ads? Cost is not an issue.

posted by cosmac to Grab Bag (8 answers total)

Best answer: I'll be using YouTube TV. It has a DVR-like feature, but I can't remember whether you can skip commercials. (I think you can but could be wrong.) Sling might be an option too.
posted by jdroth at 7:54 PM on June 16, 2021

Best answer: YouTube TV will let you skip commercials on recorded things, but I haven’t seen that functionality at all for live events.
posted by MadamM at 8:06 PM on June 16, 2021

Best answer: Yup, you definitely want YouTube TV. Make sure you set it to record, rather than use their own “on demand”; the former lets you fast forward, the latter does not.
posted by nancynickerson at 8:34 PM on June 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

I would expect Peacock, being NBC, to carry the Olympics and possibly have some exclusive stuff. However, in my experience watching live wrestling events, rewind/fast-forward don't work live (only on pre-recorded shows). It's cheaper than YouTube TV, which I also have, but I assume you'll be free trialing anyway.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 5:35 AM on June 17, 2021

Best answer: deadline.com has a good summary of Olympic coverage.

The NBC family of networks are putting the Olympics on Peacock, which is free + premium. Peacock will have four daily summary shows, plus many sports of limited attention in the USA. Premium Peacock is $4.99 a month.

Youtube TV will have NBC, and NBCSN. They won't have Peacock; that's a separate service.

The overview website is NBCOlympics.com
posted by blob at 6:15 AM on June 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I will be using ExpressVPN to watch the coverage via the BBC iplayer. No ads, no sudden breaks half way through an event or race to go to something else, large choice of what events to watch.

Only warning that I remember from last time: if you want to watch that is not live, you might need to carefully navigate around the site to avoid spoilers.
posted by EllaEm at 6:22 AM on June 17, 2021 [2 favorites]

Past performance is no indicator of future results, but during the last Winter Olympics (pre-Peacock) I found that whatever Sling plan included CNBC and MSNBC functioned as working credentials in the "log in with your cable provider" interface on nbcolympics.com. They had a multistream experience for live events that didn't rate a full TV channel, and in general they didn't insert commercials into things that were only being streamed. At one point during the curling round robin I figured out I could tile four windows and mute three of them, allowing me to watch all four matches at once. Curling is a special case, though, since the crowd noise associated with one match can be heard in all the other streams.
posted by fedward at 7:45 AM on June 17, 2021

VipLeague.lc has a lot of links to comprehensive streams from different networks, plus links to specific events day to day. It's a bootleg site, so you need to figure out which ads to wait through and which to close, but once you get a stream going, you are generally not going to see any more ads (live events mostly default to a silent, static screen during broadcast ads). The site also works for a lot of non-Olympic sports. I really don't know much about this site except that it works if you want to see a specific live baseball game or something. I haven't been watching any Olympics, but I just clicked through the BBC and CBC streams and they worked.
posted by gum at 9:15 PM on July 29, 2021