I can actually treat my Olympic fever this year

Hard to believe we're in a year for the summer Olympics again, but that's because they had to delay by a year last time due to the pandemic. What's awesome this time is that, finally, the streaming situation is what it should it be, and I can watch all of the volleyball that I can stand.

As I've declared many times before, I don't really get into a lot of sportsball, but I'm fairly religious about watching volleyball during the Olympics (and also the NCAA women's finals). The move to streaming for sports has been slow and stupid, but the potential was obvious early on. Here's how it's gone the last few times:

• 2008, Beijing: NBC uses Microsoft's now defunct Silverlight (conceptually similar to Flash, which is also dead) to run an in-browser player that can show as many as four streams at a time. I'm not sure how many events were covered, but in the end it was more than 3,000 hours of sports. I recall seeing a lot of the volleyball that would not have made it on TV. What did suck was that anything that was supposed to be on broadcast was not shown online. Volleyball got preempted several times, meaning you couldn't see it at all, or only see it late in the match.
• 2012, London: Silverlight was basically dead at that point, and because of various contracts, you could only see stuff online with the right cable subscription, which I did not have. It was a step backward. Again, NBC cut stuff off or outright skipped the important matches on TV.
• 2016, Rio: NBC streamed everything, and I didn't miss a single USA Women match. Finally, the world was right. I still had a computer hooked up to my TV, and watched much of it on a big screen.
• 2020, Tokyo (technically 2021): Again, NBC took a step backward. By that time, there was at least an app for every streaming device, so I could watch stuff on FireTV via the new Peakcock app. Sort of. I had to side-load the Android version, because they didn't have it for FireTV yet. But once again, you had to have a cable subscription to watch everything, likely a symptom of NBCUniversal being owned by Comcast. Fortunately, they did stream all USA matches, but the international scene is so high level that I didn't want to miss any of it. You couldn't just give them money either, to unlock it all.

This year, Peacock was offering a $20 deal for one year, so I got that a few months ahead of Paris. It was a no-brainer. As far as I can tell, they're going to stream literally everything. I looked in the Peacock app, and there are tiles for every single volleyball match, from pool play to elimination rounds. It won't stream in 4K, but I can live with "old" HD.

I've been watching the FIVB rankings, and the women's side has been volatile this year. Last time I looked, Turkey was on top, but now it's Italy. USA is down to #5, but mercifully, got the easiest pool. They have #6 China, which they lost to in their last two meetings spread out across the last year. I think they have a good shot at winning the pool. They did beat Italy once last year, but appear to have struggled with Brazil, Turkey and Poland.

The #6 men are in the pool with #2 Japan, but they did beat them in their only match last year. Poland is dominating everyone, but they did lose to #4 France and #5 Slovenia, so maybe the ranking means less than I think.

I hope to see some of the later tennis matches as well, and of course I'll probably turn on the usual evening coverage on broadcast for the gymnastics and swimming and such.

I have to go lie down now. I'm feeling a little warm. Definitely a fever.