Your Olympics, Your Way

Oh, it was one of those nights at the Winter Olympics.
Canada in a men's hockey nailbiter with Switzerland (yes, that's no typo). Patrick Chan trying to climb a mountain in the men's free skate final in figure skating. Speed skater Christine Nesbitt getting her gold medal. And probably something else I'm leaving out, no doubt.
Anyways, you get the point. It's waaaay too much for any one TV to handle, no matter how adept a person is with the remote.
So what's an avid Olympic viewer like moi to do?
Just fire up the video player at CTVOlympics.ca, that's what. And so it was that an Olympic-phile in Ottawa could watch Canada and the Swiss take it to a hockey shootout while keeping an eye on men's figure skating on his laptop. And while my TV is "crystal clear" HD, the picture quality of the online stuff wasn't too far behind.
Apparently, I'm not the only one living the Olympic high life online. Canada's Olympic media broadcast consortium reports that through the first six days of the Vancouver Games, video views on its two websites (RDSOlympiques.ca is the French version) had cracked the 10 million mark. That's long since surpassed such totals for Beijing 2008.
Even more impressive is that the website numbers, for both video views and page views, continue to rise with each passing day.
Add to that the 700 or so hours of video on demand slated to be available at CTVOlympics.ca and it's pretty clear you can watch these Games on your schedule. It's your Olympics, your way.
Meanwhile, given that the action is only beginning to heat up in Vancouver, count on me doing the double viewing dip on plenty of occasions before the flame is extinguished on Feb. 28.
None of this, by the way, should be seen as a surprise. Many in the broadcast know predict the future of television is online.
That future, it seems, has already arrived at Vancouver 2010.
I know I, for one, am giving thanks for that. Pretty much every day now.