NBC has announced today that it’s going to live stream a record 1,800 hours of the 2018 Winter Olympic Games from PyeongChang, South Korea. This is a record for the Winter Olympics. NBC’s streaming coverage of the games will be a combination of digital-only streams and authenticated TV viewing.
This is a significant increase from the 2014 Winter Olympics when NBC provided 1,000 hours of live streamed coverage.
For authenticated TV viewers, NBC is going to provide live streaming of the games on NBCOlympics.com as well as through the NBC Sports app for desktop, mobile devices, tablets, and connected TVs. The coverage will span across all 15 sports and 102 medal events and will also include the coverage that airs on TV networks.
All of the content that’s streamed through the app is only going to be available to authenticated pay TV subscribers. It’s not like cord-cutters will be able to get a lot of mileage out of this initiative.
Cord cutters will get a temporary pass to the live streams. Before authenticating, they can watch 30 minutes of live coverage on the first visit and then five minutes per day after that.
The digital-only coverage includes three programs specifically for this medium only alongside live streams of practices. There’s also going to be an active news desk that’s going to push out Olympic updates every day.
Five NBCUniversal Olympic networks will be broadcasting their coverage online, this includes the NBC broadcast network and the NBCSN, CNBC, and USA cable channels.