This post is a part of Geek Takeover Week 2016.
It has been widely reported that NBC’s coverage of the Olympics has been terrible, sexist, and tape-delayed, but even if you’re not in the United States, getting good coverage of the sports you want shouldn’t be left up to your TV. Fortunately, getting set up takes only a few minutes and I’ve gone through many of the options to show you how to access the best feed for little more than a VPN fee.
Download TunnelBear
One of the best VPN for travelers, TunnelBear does the best job of getting around regional blocks for our Olympiad purposes. TunnelBear offers 500MB free, but streaming video will eat that up quickly. Purchase a month of unlimited data from TunnelBear for $7.99 (no contract needed), download it on your desktop, now we’re good to go.
- Mobile Issues – Although TunnelBear works on mobile devices, the streaming service we’ll be using doesn’t play nicely with it. You can give it a try, but iOS users might find some issues connecting to the Olympic coverage.
Once you’ve installed TunnelBear, activate it, then set it to Canada. Next, set your browser window to privacy mode. Here’s how on Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Microsoft Edge.
Oh, Canada
Yes, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporate (CBC) has excellent Olympics coverage. You can sort by sport, time of day, plus see what sports are currently happening and for how long. Additionally you can multi-screen in a single window – now if you could just search by countries competing (and be shown only those events for the times given) it would be perfect. But still, CBC has excellent coverage.
- CBC Olympics Streaming Link – Once you have TunnelBear set to Canada and activated, open up your private browsing window and head to this CBC link.
There, now you should be able to watch all of the Olympics you want while traveling or as any time your boss isn’t looking over your shoulder. Let me know if you have any questions or come across any issues, in the comments below. Let the games continue!
[Top photo: Cameron Spencer via Getty Images]
The site ifirstrowus.eu streams almost all sports (including the Olympics) for free without need for a VPN but it has a bunch of annoying ads so I highly suggest using an ad blocker.