For Better or Werts : TV Worth Watching

OLYMPICS: Watch 2,200 hours online

Since you never know when you're gonna wanna see North Korea play Nigeria in a pre-Olympic women's soccer match, you should go now -- NOW -- to NBCOlympics.com and download the Silverlight plug-in, so you can watch live streaming Olympics video on your computer. (Both Windows and Mac, though only Macs running on Intel chips.)

What are you waiting for? Go to this page -- click on any video, and do what the download protocol tells you to.

Because on Friday and over the weekend -- once the Beijing Olympics begin -- everybody will be heading there. And you know what those internet traffic jams are like.

In addition to the 1,400 hours of tube time NBC promises on its broadcast/cable networks (USA, Oxygen, Universal HD, et al), NBCOlympics.com is set to stream an additional 2,200 hours of events unlikely to get TV love -- archery, badminton, fencing, handball, judo, water polo. Even early matches in basketball and tennis are on this weekend's online schedule of 20 simultaneous streams. (And that doesn't count the 3,000 hours of on-demand web access to video recaps, profiles, highlights, et al.)

The streaming video quality is pretty swell, in my early experiments with a MacBookPro (2008 vintage) on a wireless connection via Comcast home broadband. Of course, there aren't 15 million people trying to access the site yet. But NBC's interface is sleek, offering tabs to click to additional pages of text info about the sport you're watching, while video continues running in its own window. You can also click to photo galleries, athlete profiiles, trivia and more.

Now is also the time to localize NBCOlympics.com's TV listings to reflect your city's NBC affiliate and cable/satellite channel locations, quick to do when the site offers you zip-specific choices (and remembers you via cookies when you come back). You can sign up for listings alerts, too, or print out selected grids.

Also online -- lots of those video "up close and personal" packages where athletes show you how to pole vault and platform drive or discuss their coaches and families. The video page lets you browse by channel (over in the right side box), with choices including all the various sports as well as Olympic trials or Beijing info. Telemundo, too -- the NBC-owned Spanish-language network offers its own video and text features en Espanol.

Start exploring now, so you'll know where to go to find what you want when you want to.

And let us know what your online experience turns out like.

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Diane Werts has been glued to the tube since she can remember, growing up in a household where the TV came on first thing in the morning and stayed on till bedtime and beyond. She worked for the USA Film Festival, then for The Dallas Morning News writing about everything from Shakespeare to macrame art to rock music (and has the hearing loss to prove it). She moved to New York's Newsday to edit their glossy TV magazine, then returned to writing about television, specializing in its stranger permutations. She's a past president of the Television Critics Association.

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