CVMTV’s Olympic coverage has been less than stellar and that is putting it in a very nice way. I’ve spent the first two days of the Olympics trying to find out what was possible in terms of alternate video sources to watch events, both live and recorded.
I tend to like the coverage of BBC. They usually have excellent commentators who are very knowledgeable on the athletes and their respective events, unlike what passes for commentary on NBC (US). BBC iPlayer was my first choice to watch the opening ceremony. To access iPlayer you have to reside in the UK or be connecting from a UK IP address through the use of a VPN. A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a technology used to access a network, securely over a public network such as the internet. It is usually used to access work or home networks remotely.
I already use a personal VPN service which I mostly use to access US content that are “geo restricted”. I searched my VPN providers list of gateways and I was most happy to find a UK gateway. I connected to the VPN and I was able to watch the Opening Ceremony which was previously recorded. I especially enjoyed being able to rewind the video and watch the Jamaican athletes entrance repeatedly. I think I watch it around five times :-).
The coverage has been fantastic so far but I must admit that I rather hate being tethered to a computer and watching the Olympic on a tablet can be quite cumbersome. I missed the 10-foot user interface of the TV and I was excited about trying the iPlayer addon for XBMC. After installing the AddOn on the XBMC front end, I was very pleased with the results and thought I would share.
This will work if you have a streamer that can run XBMC (AppleTV2 etc) or if you are connecting a computer to your television.
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After installing XBMC and installing the AddOn you’ll connect to your VPN and start XBMC. In the Video AddOn you’ll launch iPlayer and enjoy the goodness.