Download Olympics Opening Ceremony @ Beijing 2008 Online

Posted in China, Technology by Elliott Back on August 10th, 2008.

If you wanted to watch the Olympics Opening Ceremony online, you might have had some problems so far. Friday, for us in the US, NBC’s site wasn’t working well (they hadn’t even posted the opening ceremony cuts). But now, there are a number of options available to you:

NBC’s Official Olympics Site

Direct link to their 52m ‘Opening Ceremony’ recap

The video is excellent quality, far better than Youtube, sound quality good. Unfortunately, it requires an installation of Microsoft’s Silverlight flash competitor, and has brief 20-30s advertisements before clips. You also can’t make the video full screen. However, if you live in the US, and don’t mind just watching the Olympics, the NBC site has a good selection of live video feeds as well as packaged and cut primetime recaps.

Mininova Bittorrent Search

Olympic Games Opening Ceremony Beijing 2008 PROPER 720p HDTV x264-PiX [eztv]

Using torrents to download the parts of the Olympic games you’re interested in guarantees a permanent archive, full screen high quality video, but perhaps an inferior selection of topics. Its legal status and availability differ around the world. Still, it’s a powerful online option.

Google’s Youtube Beijing 2008 Channel

Beijing 2008 Channel

If you don’t live in the US YouTube might an option for you. Google is going to syndicate at least three hours of Olympics a day on their special channel. But, the quality is crappy, and if you live in the US, you’ll just see “This channel is not available in your country.”

I also recommend you check out the Boston Globe’s 2008 Olympics Opening Ceremony Big Picture Photos and Wired’s Watch the Olympics Online Wiki for more 2008 Beijing Olympics Online!