I cut the TV cord many years ago, and watch everything streaming or downloaded. When it comes to sports, though, particularly the Olympics, streaming and Cloud DVR don't remotely cut it, and so I record the over-the-air broadcast to a local disk using open source DVR software, and watch from my local disk, sometimes delayed just a few minutes to an hour from "live."

Once you watch that way, you can't go back. You can seek around instantly, and I mean instantly. If I press my "Forward 10 seconds" button it does it within milliseconds. Same for back. Rewind and FF run at many speeds, and up to 3x they are perfectly smooth. Up to 2x they are smooth and the audio is played, pitch-adjusted.

Sports are full of boring gaps, not just the commercials. And depending on your view of the sport, you may also decide to skip or speed up action. If it's my favourite sport I might watch it all, but otherwise you'll see me skipping long sections of a long road race, or all the points in a volleyball or tennis match until it gets closer to the decision. TV coverage that is edited down does this (and smarter) but it's also nice when you control it entirely and pick what you want. And you can watch a sport in less than half the time, even 1/10th the time if you want, which means you get to watch a lot more within your time budget.

Streaming doesn't work for this. While YouTube is fairly decent, most streaming and cloud DVR services have huge latency on any attempts to seek around or rewind/FF to the point of being unusable. With regular shows it's OK because we don't seek that much, mostly to skip commercials (which they don't like anyway.) But it's worse that that.

It could be better

Streaming services could and should offer a mode for people who want to seek around. They could let me request it, or just switch to it if they see me seeking. The simplest approach is to just switch to a mode where they start downloading the whole program so I can do seeking on a local device. Either fast (I have a gigabit) or slow (I'll wait and watch later.) They don't like using up bandwidth for stuff you will skip over, but I would pay more for this to make up for it. However, they could also try to write systems that are very smart in what to pre-cache. For example, you could cache a selection of I-frames (streaming video consists of complete frames known as I-frames which come every second or two, and other frames which send only the difference from the previous frame.) This would let me instantly seek around, with possible delay once I pick my new location. They could send the whole video in "10x fastforward" so that I can always seek around a high-speed stream instantly. They could predict where I am likely to go and send that. While a local disk lets me literally jump to any frame, I don't actually need that -- only being able to jump to selected frames is fine and I won't notice if I asked to jump 10 seconds and it jumps 9 seconds because that's what pre-loaded.

In other words, with some smarts, they don't need to charge much more. It does need more local storage, though storage is cheap now, and having a micro-SD slot or USB socket on the streaming device would do the job, or it can be given the ability to access a local disk server or your computer or NAS box.

It could also just try not to suck badly

I wanted more than NBC shows over the air, and I wanted to watch what I could in 4K. 4K is great, and it's really useful for field sports like soccer, where they show the whole field but you want to see where the ball is in detail. Nobody yet composes the frame for 4K--they only recently started composing for HD--and that's reasonable as it's really hard to get a 4K feed.

I bought Sling which promised it would give NBC's 4K feed on USA channel. (NBC's feed only has a small amount of true 4K, the rest is upscaled 4K but it does include HDR, which I want.) Sling promised to work on my 4K Fire TV, but it turned out that they don't support the older model of that. They don't offer a free trial or a refund, so they've lost many points in my book. They only work on newer Roku and Fire sticks, not on the Sling app that is native to my TV (which would be the obvious choice.)

It was also useless when watching an event on delay. I tried to watch the opening ceremony but it would only let me rewind once. After it was done and you watched it hours later, you could seek around tolerably (but not great.)

Peacock

NBC is putting the full Olympics into Peacock. This includes the "World" coverage of all those events NBC is not putting on their main feed. Great in theory. As an Xfinity gigabit customer I got "Peacock Premium" included. That service is chock full of commercials, and worse, when you watch recordings, it inserts them anywhere it can. And if you try to seek ahead, and seek over where a commercial was supposed to be, it makes you watch all the commercials you missed. It's unbearable, especially since they repeat the same ads over and over and you can't pause or fast forward in a commercial. At least you can hit mute.

Even so, I watched the women's triathalon this way. You could use your arrow keys to seek forward 15 seconds and hold it down to do a sort of visual fast forward. It was sort of working and we watched the race. But the commercials drove me nuts, so I went to pay for the commercial-free version.

Well, not long ago you couldn't! If you got the premium version included free with something, they had no way to sell you the commercial-free version. But eventually I was able to find a path, they had recently fixed it, but you had to pay the full price of $14/month even though you already had the regular version included. That sucked but I bought it, and started to watch the men's triathalon.

My seeking had gone away. All that was left was a blind fast forward, where you can change the cursor at various speeds without being able to see where you are. No commercials, but close to useless. I could not longer say, "let's go forward until they get to the turn" you can only say "let's go forward 5 minutes." Going forward a short distance isn't really practical.

Buy paying full price, I had made it worse. This also deserves a refund that's probably not worth the hassle of dealing with Comcast customer service for. I am not sure how much I will use it.

Local recording

What I have done with this feed is a kludge, but it's the best result. I start the stream playing on a computer in the house, and I have a screen recorder make a video of it as it plays. Then I can go into my DVR and play that file as a local file. It works, and I don't even need the commercial free feed as I can skip those commercials. (My DVR does this automatically, even on a modest delay.) The main problem is it's work to set up. It would be nice if I could automate it.

Spoilers!

Even though lots of people are watching streams and recordings, nobody does anything to help you avoid spoilers. Worst of all was my effort to watch the Rugby Gold final. The day of the game, I avoided spoilers then went into Peacock to watch, and they changed the title of the video to be, "X defeats Y for Gold." Thanks.

In the future, not only do I want a way to watch on delay (of say a day or two) without spoilers, I would like to see coverage designed for the stream watcher. This would include edits of the full stream so I can watch properly crafted "good parts" versions, and even choose among different edits based on what I am interested in and how much time I have. It would be nice to choose between the 5 minute, 10 minute, 20 minute and full versions of a match.

I also would like a system to direct me to watch more obscure events when they are particularly good. If you didn't watch it, check out the gold medal final in women's team Archery between China and Korea. There are many events which are quite dramatic, especially in their good-parts version. Nobody sees them because they aren't featured, or if you learn about them, it's a spoiler. A great example in the last olympics was the astonishing cycle road race of Anna Kiesenhofer of Austria. What a story, and most people saw it only after hearing about what she did, and it would be great that, even if you don't normally watch the cycling road race for women, you had been pointed to without knowing why.

The same is true for the Bronze match in women's rugby in 2024. Though the USA was in it, it wasn't shown live on US TV, and all anybody saw was highlights. You want a way that you just end up watching that game without knowing you're going to get something exciting.