Engadget guide to watching The Olympics

We're already about a third of the way through the Olympics and it's pretty clear that we need to get a project plan and an Excel spreadsheet and start using Outlook to schedule in the handful of events we'd like to see. With something seven channels offering all of the coverage it's a little overwhelming if you want to catch just a couple events.

There are lots of resources out there, like NBC's uber-site, but it's filled with ads, and since we're loathe to just record all of it and skip around fast-forward to find what we want, we've decided to put together some links and resources to help you surgically strike, er, wade through the morass and find exactly what it is you want to watch. A
lot of this is pretty basic stuff, but if you've been feeling frustrated with Olympics coverage we hope this helps.

Web Streaming?

There were a few stories about how you can?t view a live stream of the Olympics unless you live in the UK. We haven?t even tried, since if we?re going to watch something we?re not going to watch it at a crummy 320 x 240 on our screen when we can just record it and watch it later on whatever we want.

That said, you could always pop in a free proxy and it would appear you?re coming from just about anywhere.

Over at PVRBlog, they had a great suggestion?just post all the videos and throw some cool sponsors in. We?d download them and be exposed to all sorts of ads we?d never usually skip past (well, we still might skip past them, anyway).

Web guide?

At night we wanted to see what was on at that moment, and
Zap2it has a printable (ad free) guide with all the stations and listing what?s on live and what?s previously recorded.

You can enter your state and personalize it to your local stations and times at the
?O-zone? but we didn?t bother to do that.

So we check these pages and once and awhile set the TiVo or Media Center PC at something specific if it catches our fickleness with Olympic games.

So far we?ve recorded a few events with our Media Center PC, watched them on other PCs (you can transfer TV recordings to any other system) as well as try them out on a Portable Media Center (on a side note we?ll have a review of the PMC
soon).

Sailing on the PMC.

Planning a bit more?
On the NBC site there?s a comprehensive schedule, and we?ve been using this to set some recordings in advance?it will also display the results if the event has already happened, just click the box(es) to drill down. And again, here?s the
ad free print version to just cut to the chase or you can always use the full version here.

For example, one of our picks are the Gold Medal matches for
Tae Kwon Do.

Since we can see all the events in one spot, we can then pop over to our TiVo and set up the events we want to grab.

Phone stuff?
If you?re an AT&T customer you can pay $1.99 and get up to 3 alerts each day
sent to your phone. They?re also letting folks ?text the athletes? we?re pretty sure this is just a way for them to make cash (not the athletes).

The fine print...There is no guarantee that all the Fan Text will be received by the intended recipient. Messages may be deleted if they include profanity, obscene language and other objectionable language.

AT&T also has some contests here and there, along with some mMode stuff if you use that (medal count, ringtones,
backgrounds, etc..). Nothing really worth writing home about, but it?s there.

Okay, so that?s about it for now. Feel free to post up in the comments if you?ve discovered some clever ways to watch the Olympics using some tech.