The year is 2016. Nearly one in four Americans are either “cord-cutters,” meaning they’ve dropped their cable TV subscriptions, or “cord-nevers,” meaning they’ve never had one. Yet NBC Universal—which owns exclusive U.S. rights to broadcast the 2016 Olympics—is still requiring people to log in with a cable subscription if they want to watch the Summer Games online.
There are a few loopholes, however.
The simplest way to watch Friday night’s opening ceremony will be on a good old-fashioned television set. NBC will broadcast the gala on a one-hour tape delay in the Eastern time zone, with coverage beginning at 7:30 p.m. The start time varies by time zone, however, so you might want to check NBC’s listings here.
If you have cable, you can follow the games over the next two weeks on NBC and its various cable channels, including MSNBC, CNBC, NBCSN, Bravo, and USA. Or you can use your cable login to watch online via NBCOlympics.com or the NBC Sports app. To its credit, NBC will live-stream every Olympics competition via these platforms.
There’s also good news for those who watch TV online via a set-top box: The NBC Sports app is now available on most major streaming platforms, including Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, iOS, Chromecast, Android devices, and even Windows phones. Again, though, you’ll need to log in with credentials from a pay-TV provider.
What if you don’t have cable? Well, you can still watch NBC’s broadcast for free over the air, provided you have a TV and a digital antenna. Lifehacker has a handy guide for choosing the best one. It’s not a bad solution if you’re interested primarily in the highest-profile events, care mostly about American athletes, and don’t mind—or even shamelessly enjoy—all those overproduced human-interest profiles cutting into the action. You’ll also find your HD antenna comes in handy for all sorts of other major sporting and cultural events to which the networks try to restrict access.
Realistically, however, if you don’t have cable, there’s a decent chance you don’t have a TV either. In that case, you’ll have to get a little creative to watch the Olympics online.
The officially sanctioned alternative would be to sign up for one of the paid streaming-TV services that carries multiple NBC networks, such as Sling TV or Playstation Vue. That won’t get you full access to the games, since neither one carries all of the relevant NBC cable channels, but you’ll be able to see a good portion of them—provided you live in the right TV market. Quartz has a good breakdown of which channels are available where, and for how much. Sling TV’s Blue package, at $25 per month, might be the best deal.
Olympics aside, Sling TV is also a pretty solid alternative to traditional cable, offering several decent channel lineups geared towards viewers with various interests. You can sign up for Sling TV here. Playstation Vue is more expensive, but also more comprehensive. And it carries one big advantage with respect to the Olympics, which is that you can use your Playstation Vue credentials like a cable login to stream the games live via the aforementioned NBC platforms. Lifehacker has some detailed tips on the best way to do that.
And if you can’t or don’t want to pay? Well, that’s where you start to run into some legal gray areas. One clever option, as Quartz points out, would be to sign up for a seven-day free trial of either Sling TV or Playstation Vue, then quit when the week is up—and immediately switch to the other one. Sneaky, but not criminal.
The hacker alternative is to use a VPN, or virtual personal network, to fool your internet provider into thinking you live in a country other than the United States. Why does that matter? Because in other, more enlightened countries like Canada and England, the games are streamed live for free to anyone who wants to watch. The right VPN will help you bypass the location restrictions that would otherwise block you from watching the games live via a network such as the BBC or CBC. Your best VPN option might still require you to sign up for a paid subscription, although that should only set you back a few bucks per month. Again, I’ll refer you to Lifehacker for detailed instructions, and I’ll send you there with the caveat that you proceed at your own risk if you choose to use a VPN in this manner.
If you really want to get into the weeds, the most exhaustive Olympics-watching guide I’ve seen is the one put together by the website Cut Cable Today. It includes detailed streaming TV signup recommendations, as well as separate viewing guides geared to fans of specific major sports.
