How to stream the Tokyo Olympics
The Tokyo Olympics have arrived and for many cord cutters the simple question is what is the best way to stream all of the events?
We’ve got you covered as we look at and compare all of the streaming options so you can watch the games live or on demand.
Unfortunately there wasn’t much information available before the Olympics about what services would have what specific events, so we have had to wait and play around with all of the services over the first few days of the games to determine how all the services are approaching both live and on demand coverage of the Olympics. We checked all of the apps we have reviewed in the days leading up to the start of the Olympics and only a handful had an Olympic section set up prior to the games starting.
The Olympics of course are a giant world event and are perfect for streaming because with so many events happening at the same time there is no way for a traditional broadcast to jump back and forth allowing the viewer to watch it all.
With streaming though you can get the chance to pick whatever event you watch and enjoy them live or on demand. Not all streaming services cover the Olympics the same way though, so in this article we’ll take a look at how each of the services is handing their Olympic coverage.
The good news is that in Canada once again the Olympics are being covered by CBC. This means that you can take advantage of the free CBC Gem app on a variety of streaming devices or download the mobile version of the app on your smartphone or tablet. CBC also has an official Olympic app for mobile devices as well as their website.
CBC has a full breakdown of how to watch the 3,775 hours of Olympic coverage from CBC, partners right on their website. They also have a full Tokyo 2020 event schedule is available. Their schedule allows you to break it down by traditional broadcast or by streaming as well as by sport by sport.
While CBC is your best bet of all of the options, the Olympics in Canada are also available on other partner apps. What wasn’t clear just before the Olympics started even from the online published schedule is how all of these partners would be working with CBC and if the events would be split amongst CBC, TSN, Sportsnet and Amazon Prime Canada.
We have been monitoring all of the apps each day since the games began and looking at what content they offer on multiple devices, how they organize it and how the navigation of these services works.
As such we’ll be adding to this article each day as we explore and discover each streaming service.
TSN / Sportsnet / Amazon Prime
If you are already have a subscription to TSN, Sportsnet or Amazon Prime Canada you have access to Olympic coverage. We tested all of these apps on devices like the Roku, Amazon Firestick, Google Chromecast and the Apple TV.
Unfortunately both TSN and Sportsnet still don’t offer an app on the Roku. TSN still doesn’t have a native app for the Amazon Firestick or the Google Chromecast. Which still makes the best device for all of these services the Apple TV.
Amazon Prime has a sub Olympic section right off of the homepage that allows you to watch live coverage although they seem to be simply repurposing CBC’s coverage both in English and French. There is some on demand content but it’s very minimal compared to what CBC is offering on their native app.
TSN & Sportsnet are also offering live coverage through their normal live channel feeds and really that seems to be it. The descriptions for the live channels don’t help much as they don’t really detail what specific event is on currently. They seem to offer a vague programming detail like ‘Scheduled events include - Beach Volleyball, Softball, Shooting & Tennis’
It’s very surprising that they don’t have a dedicated Olympic section on their apps. Again these are supposed to be the premiere dedicated sports channels in Canada and they couldn’t take the time to create a special curated content section for one of the biggest sporting events. TSN has a dedicated Olympic highlights section if you scroll down with limited clips you can watch but that’s it.
The on demand sections of Sportsnet have some of their broadcasts up, but they don’t stay up for very long. TSN is not offering any kind of coverage on demand.
CBC Gem
CBC’s Gem streaming app is definitely the best option for many reasons including that it is available on the most platforms. We tested it on Roku, Amazon Firestick, Google Chromecast and the Apple TV, but as we mentioned before you can also watch all of their coverage on their website and mobile app.
Beyond the fact that CBC’s coverage is widespread and complete compared to the other services like TSN, Sportsnet and Amazon Prime which are all paid services, CBC Gem is completely free to download and use.
Comparing the Platforms
The Roku version of the app really isn’t going to give you much because the Roku CBC app is a paired down version of the app. It only offers the live regional feeds and most of them are offering the same coverage no matter what region you choose.
The latest Google Chromecast app had some issues, we couldn’t even get into the Olympic section. We tried for 3 days straight, deleted and reinstalled the app. It would not work.
UPDATE: After hearing from the folks at CBC we deleted the app and reinstalled it again and it is now working fine.
The Amazon Firestsick worked for the most part, but one of the issues we had was with the on demand events. The ability to fast forward through the streams didn’t work.
UPDATE: After publishing our article on July 26th CBC informed us that for the Amazon Firestick version of the CBC Gem app you can fast forward and rewind but you have to hit the centre select button to jump to that point. Not optimal but they are working on fixing it.
We tried it and it does work this way but is very cumbersome especially since the Firestick has built in fast forward and rewind buttons. So not sure how average cord cutters would figure that out on their own.
By far the best version of this app is on the Apple TV. The Olympic section of the app allows you to watch events live or on demand by day.
On any of the devices you can sort by every event and watch any events you may have missed on demand. No need to try and PVR every event you may want to watch.
On the Apple TV we were able to fast forward and rewind through any event on demand including the same Women’s Canadian Softball game we couldn’t fast forward through on the Amazon Firestick.
There are a few challenges with the CBC Gem app that we found. One of those is the on demand streams coverage does not remember where you are in the stream itself. We found this out when we sat down to watch the on demand Road Cycling - Women’s Road Race which is an event that lasted over 4 hours.
We watched about an hour of the event one evening before we went to sleep and when we turned it back on the next day it started the event from the beginning. That was frustrating, but since CBC’s app allows you to fast forward we were able to jump back to the spot we left off.
We do wish that these apps offered a continue watching section that most of us have come to expect with other streaming services like Netflix, Amazon and others.
One other feature request that would be a nice to have would be the highlight of our Canadian athletes and where they are competing in the various streams. Instead we have had to slowly scrub through the streams trying to find the exact spot where the Canadians were.
One of the bigger disappointments we had with the CBC Gem app and all the other services was that it doesn’t support the Apple TV picture in a picture (PIP) feature.
With an event like the Olympics you probably would love to have the ability to watch multiple events at once on your big screen TV.
Only Sportsnet offers this feature so we were able to hack a bit of a workaround that allowed us to use the feature on the Apple TV and watch both some CBC coverage of one event and Sportsnet’s coverage of another event. Unfortunately since it’s a bit of a hack you can’t switch back and forth between feeds which really is the intended use of the feature.
Outside of Canada
Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) is an internal Olympic broadcast service that produces the world feed provided to local broadcasters for use in their coverage. In most regions, broadcast rights to the 2018 and 2020 Olympics were packaged together, but some broadcasters obtained rights to further games as well. You can see the full list of broadcasters here.
One of the reasons we love cord cutting is because this year with so many different broadcasters covering the Olympics it means you have a huge selection of options on ways to stream the games.
USA - NBC Sports / Peacock
In 2014 NBC paid $7.75bn for the US Olympic broadcast rights until 2032. Unfortunately people’s public opinion of NBC’s coverage hasn’t been great and there have been lots of articles written about it to date, many that are quite harsh.
”NBC paid $7.75bn for its Olympic rights ... and we got televisual vomit” - Source: The Guardian
“Is This NBC’s Nightmare Olympics Scenario?” - Source: Vulture
This year NBC had a streaming ace up their sleeve in the form of their own subscription-free based streaming service called Peacock that they launched back in July of 2020. We reviewed this service when it first launched.
Peacock should have been a great triumph for NBC and cord cutters but the reality is that it has been a huge mess. At first glance of the service during the first few days of the games Peacock looked promising.
First off they had a predefined Olympic section, they had sub categories for most of the sports.
We paid for a Peacock subscription when it first launched, but considering how many of the streaming services that are covering the Olympics for free (like CBC Gem) we had no intention of paying the $4.99 / $9.99 US for the service to watch the US broadcasts of the Olympics. This is where the brunt of complaints for many comes from with Peacock and their Olympic coverage. Since the service has two different subscription tiers and a free tier all of the events should be available on all tiers, but they aren’t. NBC decided early on that certain events like the US Men’s Basketball games would only be available to watch live or on demand via the paid tiers.
Much of the additional criticism of NBC’s Olympic coverage comes from the overproduced elements of the games. This includes vignettes about who the US athletes are and where they came from as well as other elements like an Olympic highlights show with Snoop Dogg and Kevin Hart or the Olympic Dreams featuring the Jonas Brothers.
In addition even if you pay for the service the ability to navigate by sport to a specific event isn’t there. So instead of being able to watch a full event on demand you get just a few clips.
In this day and age of streaming especially if you are paying for a service why would you not make every minute of every sport available to your subscribers?
The odd thing about Peacock is that the opposite user experience is happening on the NBC Sports streaming app. The difficulty lies in the fact that NBC Sports is a TV Everywhere streaming app that requires a valid cable subscription to use.
If you aren’t familiar with the term TV Everywhere then read our article that talks about the 4 main types of streaming services.
If you do have a valid US cable subscription to verify the NBC Sports app then you have access to live coverage as well as on demand replays of every sport.
This means that all of the US Men’s Basketball games are available on demand for no charge.
That seems to be the case for most sports no matter what you want to watch.
In fact we think that the NBC Sports app organizes the events better than even the CBC Gem app. You pick a sport and then all of the events are organized on one scrollable screen by date.
Where on the CBC Gem app you can sort by sport but you have to switch day by day which seems like an extra unneeded step.
The other thing we found better about the NBC Sports app is that they do actually have every sport on demand. As an example if you look at the schedule of Handball they started playing on the first day (July 23rd) and yet CBC doesn’t have any games to watch on demand until July 28th and on.
NBC Sports has all of the qualifying games and finals, Peacock only has the gold medal matches and again you have to be a premium member to watch them.
In reality NBC really should have just duplicated the NBC Sports app experience in Peacock. It would make for a far better product that people would be willing to pay for.
If you happen to be using a Roku, they have a specific Olympic section (US Only) but most of it is just curated summaries that come from NBC. To watch any full event live or on demand you still need some sort of subscription.
UK - BBC iPlayer / discovery+ / Eurosport
In the UK this years Olympics are spread across several streaming services. This includes the BBC iPlayer as well as pay-TV company Discovery who bought the majority of UK television rights in a £920m deal in 2016.
This is the first time the BBC has had to share the rights for the Olympics. For the London 2012 and Rio 2016 Olympics the BBC had offered an amazing immersive streaming experience. For this years games folks in the UK have had to figure out which service has what. With some events being on BBC’s iPlayer but other events behind a paywall. Discovery is using their Eurosport channels as well as their new £6.99-a-month streaming service Discovery+.
Due to the sub-licensing deal between Discovery and the IOC the BBC is limited to showing two live events at one time. Everything else is available to viewers via Eurosport or Discovery+. This results in many events are not covered live by the BBC.
Overall the BBC iPlayer experience is still as great as almost everything else that the BBC does. Due to their restrictions you don’t get a deep dive sport by sport on demand breakdown of the games.
discovery+ has set up a seperate Olympic section. We did not subscribe to the service but were still able to browse the service and look through how their Olympic content is organized.
Like the CBC Gem and NBC Sports apps they have sub categories of all of most of the events although there are some missing and there is also a Misc category which seems like a slight against the sports assigned to it.
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