I'll probably be going the VPN route for the Olympics this year. Here in the States NBC has exclusive broadcast rights. During the Beijing games they were testing online streaming for the first time, and it worked great. I could watch whatever I wanted, when I wanted. During the Vancouver games they decided to change things up and block access to most of the content unless you were subscribed to a participating cable or satellite provider. I happened to be house-sitting for my grandmother at the time who did have such a service. I could never get the authentication system to work.
So unless NBC changes its tune, I'll be looking to the BBC to actual provide coverage. Maybe even my friends to the north in Canada. My Canadian friends said the CBC's coverage of the Vancouver games was excellent.
Restricted access is all to familiar for me although the situation feels slightly better than in the rest of Europe.
A recent trend in bypassing geo-restricted content seems to be a DNS solution. I signed up for an account with playmoTV (http://playmo.tv/) a couple of months ago which has work quite well in streaming Hulu Plus, Netflix, Pandora and Spotify here in Iceland. In addition it's quite ironic to see DNS layer being used to grant access to restricted content while SOPA/PIPA plans to use it to restrict access even further.
Their focus is to enable access to US content but I have it confirmed from their help desk that UK support (BBC iPlayer, Sky Go and ITV) is soon to be announced. Might be something to look into for the Olympics.
So unless NBC changes its tune, I'll be looking to the BBC to actual provide coverage. Maybe even my friends to the north in Canada. My Canadian friends said the CBC's coverage of the Vancouver games was excellent.