BBC to offer virtual reality coverage of Olympics

The 2016 Summer Olympics, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, get underway tonight with the opening ceremony.

Some 4,500 hours are digitally accessible on the website and the NBC Olympics app (check iTunes, Google Play, Windows, Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire).

The catch is you must watch everything in real time.

If the experiment is successful, it could pave the way for more frequent and extensive VR coverage.

New content will be added daily with around 100 hours available in total. It costs $30 or $40 a month, depending on the market.

The expanded cable offerings: NBCSN (330 hours) is the main fallback for as much as possible on Team USA – specifically women’s soccer and men’s and women’s basketball, plus boxing, cycling, archery, rugby, shooting, table tennis, weightlifting and wrestling. NBC and Telemundo stations are offered in more than a dozen markets each.

Asked if NBC will make it clear the announcers are off site, Bell said that “whether they’re outside in a TV (trailer) calling it off a monitor or high above the field of play looking at it off a monitor or happen to be 6,000 miles away in Stamford calling it off a monitor, I mean, it’s a courageous new world. people are on Facebook Live and things are being live-streamed all the time on Periscope”. These, though, would need you to sign up with your pay TV account to access. There may be restrictions on viewing recordings or real-time channels from outside your home – though NBC’s app is available for that. Back in the day, television was consumed over the airwaves and not through cables.

You can have a look at the 360 degree footage in glorious virtual reality on mobile or desktop platforms, though you’ll need a VR headset to take full advantage.

More visual specialization: Something called a 4K Ultra HD will offer 83 hours on a one-day delay.

If illness or other crises arise, does NBC bear some responsibility for what happens because of the large license fee it pays to the International Olympics Committee, the NBC team was asked.

The British broadcaster said it would be “the next best thing” for those that can’t make it over to Brazil for this year’s Olympics.

More than 500,000 tourists are expected to come to the Games and organisers say more than one million of the 7.5 million tickets remain unsold. So while NBC’s announcers cover an event live on television, with an online simulcast, NBC’s website and app will usually carry the worldwide feed.

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