If you have not noticed, its Summer Olympics time again one year later than usual (thanks Coronavirus Pandemic). I am not a huge sports fan but I always look forward to the Olympics so that I can see sports that are not usually shown on television; sports like badminton, road, mountain and track cycling. Unfortunately, the networks that have the rights for the Olympics only highlight the most popular sports like swimming, swimming and swimming. Of course, I am exaggerating but there does seem to be an awful lot of swimming events. No offence to those swimming fans out there. When they do show some of the more obscure sporting events, they usually only show 5-10 minutes of them before they cut back to the more popular sports. This is understandable given that the networks have to show what has the biggest audiences to please the viewers and of course their advertisers. This year is a little different though…
The availability of more Olympic events this year may be as a result of the banning of fans from the stands or the increased popularity of streaming. Whatever the reason, the national broadcaster in Canada, the CBC, has gotten on the streaming and on-demand bandwagon in a big way for the Tokyo Olympics. As is usual, the CBC is televising many events on their traditional television network as well as through their broadcast partners, TSN and Sportsnet. But this year you can access countless hours of Olympic content on their website and through their streaming service, CBC Gem. They have also made available live and on-demand contact on Amazon Prime Video. I have the Android version of the CBC Gem app on my Smart television, so I decided to see what was available on that platform.
Their Olympic content was up front once you open their app but their user interface is not the most intuitive compared to other more mature streaming services like Netflix or Prime Video. Once I did figure out the UI, I was amazed by the content that was available which was organized by date and event. At the top of the screen is the date and below this is a grid pattern of all of the events available for streaming for that day. If you choose the current day in which some events may still be going on these events are available as live streams; other events that are already completed are available as “Replays”. Once you choose the event you want to view you just navigate to the picture of that event and click on it. If the event is not yet available then you will just get an image and no video; I encountered this issue initially as I imagine it takes some time to process the video and put it on line. I just returned to the event later and it was eventually available. Some events have commentators while other events provide only the audio from the event venue. Although there is advertising on most of the events, they are short and are presented, for the most part, when the event has paused.
I am not sure if all of the Olympic events are being made available by the CBC but I was able to find those that I was interested in (e.g. badminton, cycling events). I also discovered some new sports that are not usually televised on regular television networks like taekwondo and fencing. I should mention a few negatives that I noticed while using the Android version of the app on my Smart television. First, I was not able to fast forward through an event. This meant that you have to watch the entire video which were sometimes upwards of 3 hours, if you do not like a specific part of the event. Also, if you want to stop and come back to it later you can’t since the app does not remember where you left off. From my point of view these are just minor inconveniences given the wide variety of content that is available through CBC Gem.
I subsequently tried the CBC Gem app on my Apple Television (version 4K, 1st generation) and on a computer and found that fast forwarding is possible using these platforms.
So whatever method you use to view the Olympics, enjoy and…
Go Canada Go.
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