Watching the Beijing Paralympics Online

We write a sports technology blog, Pulse Jam,www.pulsejam.com. Today's post regarding online viewing options for the Summer Paralympics might be interesting.
The 2008 Paralympic Summer Games in Beijing held their official opener on Saturday. The next week and a half will bring roughly 4,000 athletes from 150 countries into one athletic village, challenging one another for gold, silver and bronze medals in nearly two dozen sports. For those who are interested in keeping up with latest from these Paralympics in Beijing, here are a few places you may want to check out.

While the NBCOlympics.com isn’t playing host this time around to the events scheduled through the 17th of the month, when the Paralympic games officially wrap up, the NBC Universal Sports site is. They are planning on carrying over 50 hours of live coverage, in addition to on-demand footage. Naturally if you're in the US and want to watch live coverage, you will have to plan on getting up pretty early.

So far, two videos are presented in the Universal Sports archive: one for the opening ceremony held Saturday; the other a highlight reel of the ceremony plus coverage of a portion of Day 1 events. As for software compatibility, for these Olympics, it's not Silverlight, nor Flash, but Windows Media format. Mac users can view coverage through a browser plugin called Flip4Mac. I've played with this a little and it's OK, a few hiccups but nothing major.

Another way to watch the Paralympic games up close is through ParalympicSportTV, www.paralympicsport.tv. This is done through Narrowstep, and while video detail isn’t particularly outstanding, the channel is tagged with the IPC (International Paralympic Committee) label, an association which might be of interest to some. If you have trouble viewing content at the main ParalympicSportTV page, an archive has also been established onYouTub, www.youtube.com/ParalympicSportTV. There are about three dozen clips that have been added to the collection so far.