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If the Internet represents instant global communications, watching the Olympics online is still based on a pre-Internet mindset.

Yes, you can watch the Olympics in streaming video, but you can do so only from a very limited number of sources, each chosen by geography.

The International Olympic Committee has signed exclusive contracts with broadcasters in 77 territories — including Africa, Asia, the Middle East, India, the Republic of Korea, Nigeria and Indonesia. But if you don't live in any of the countries where exclusive contracts have not been signed, you won't be able to see the feeds directly on the Internet — each webcaster has had to agree with the IOC to install measures to block surfers from other countries.

This is done to protect revenue from advertisers, who buy ads based on where their products are sold.

NBC, for instance, is an easily available TV network in Canada; it also has a website at NBCOlympics.com , on which viewers can expect to see 2,200 hours of live television. But you won't be able to see that from Canada, or any other country either. NBC paid handsomely for that, er..., exclusivity.

This is only an example; Canadians will be served just as well (or even better) by CBC.ca , which is streaming their TV coverage of the Olympics live. The CBC is planning to broadcast nine streams of coverage, for a total of 1,500 hours of coverage, more than the TV network plans to broadcast.

The IOC, however, knows full well that creative individuals will make every effort to get around online restrictions; in an 11th-hour deal, the IOC struck an agreement with YouTube to set up a special channel for Olympic clips. Youtube.com/beijing2008 is not available in Canada because CBC owns the broadcast right.

For the technically minded, ad-hoc networks are being set up involving proxy servers, which make it appear you are accessing the coverage from the correct country. But the process is difficult, involving port-redirection on your own computer, and requires a lot of patience and tech savvy to set up. Moreover, proxy servers are rarely reliable and slow, and your signal might be worse than nothing.

Finally, for the conscience-free, Torrent downloads are sure to appear all over the place with highlights of the games.

One last thing: Much of the Olympics are being streamed by official carriers in a form that is improved by installing Microsoft's Silverlight plug-in to your browser and by installing Adobe's Flash player. Unfortunately, Apple Mac or Linux users are left out of this equation.

The bottom line? It's still best to watch the Olympics on television — the 2008 Beijing games are the first to be broadcast entirely in high-definition TV. Yes, online technology has developed markedly since the last Olympics, but so has TV.

The best places to watch online:

1. CBC Sports : free viewing for Canadian residents, with excellent quality and coverage designed for Canadians.
2. Watch Olympic Games is a paid subscription channel. It costs $99 for the duration of the Games, and there is a brief pre-games window during which the price will be down to $49.95 until some time tonight. The quality and national bias of the feed are unknown.
3. NBC Olympics is a state-of-the-art site with excellent and clear statistics, but will not stream live content into Canada. NBC has also placed other restrictions on its coverage; no events scheduled to be televised on normal NBC channels will be available online until after they are seen on TV.
4. YouTube, a special channel for random clips. The IOC supplies the footage, about 500 to 800 segments over the duration of the Games. You watch for free, but YouTube will sell advertising around the channel, but only be to official Olympic sponsors. Not available in Canada.
5. Piratical practices: China is top nation in terms of peer-to-peer video streaming, with PPLive officially licensed to show the games — but only to an audience within China. If you can get a good proxy server to this site, you might get lucky. Streaming video hosts such as Ustream , Stickam and Justin.tv have said they will try to relay coverage of the games, but you will find yourself taking chances with these.
   BitTorrent could be a semi-legal answer for watching after the fact, and you have to have BitTorrent software installed, and then search sites such as Mininova and The Pirate Bay or invitation-only communities such as Sportbit.org .