For the first time in history, you can watch everything at the Winter Olympics live.
To do so, you'll need a computer and a subscription either for cable or another pay TV service like DirecTV. Without them, you can't access NBC's livestream coverage and, depending on the event, may instead have to wait until NBC's tape-delayed prime-time broadcast on KTUU-Channel 2. And good luck avoiding spoilers throughout the day.
Some events will air live on NBC's cable channels -- MSNBC, CNBC, USA Network and NBC Sports. For a listing of what will be shown when, check the TV listings at nbcolympics.com. Or, you can check the newspaper -- the Daily News scoreboard will run two days' worth of Olympic TV listings every day.
The livestream coverage of Wednesday night's slopestyle snowboarding preliminaries, which included Anchorage's Ryan Stassel, was pretty slick.
The audio was clear and the video outstanding, with little to no buffering. If you don't expand to a full screen, you'll see a very cool feature -- a live Twitter feed offering "official" tweets from people covering the event and comments from people watching online. Wednesday's Twitter crowd showed no mercy to the announcer. (Example: "I wish someone would double-cork him.")
If you are a GCI subscriber and plan to follow the Olympics via livestream, you need to set up a GCI user profile if you don't already have one. Have your account number handy and follow the directions at nbcolympics.com. It's pretty easy.
Be forewarned: All viewing is live. If you join an event in progress, you can't rewind to the beginning.
There is no option to buy a livestream subscription. However, you can get 30 minutes of free viewing the first time you want to watch something, and five minutes a day after that.
By BETH BRAGG