But a little widget on my righthand column.  Won’t be operational until tomorrow.

For those who must resort to watching Olympics online, NBC, who has sole rights to Olympic broadcasts in the U.S., will be providing thousands of hours of content on the web at NBCOlympics.com.  They’ll have four live streams and 3,000 hours of on-demand video online, which should be enough.

And if it ain’t — well — these are the days of the Intertubes, so we don’t necessarily have to rely on NBC, do we.  No, we don’t.

TV Tonic. NBC paired with Wavexpress to offer event highlights on demand via a download service similar to iTunes. If you use Windows Media Center to watch TV you’ll see a link to this software marked as "NBC Olympics" in the Online Media strip. This will offer video ranging in quality from 840×480 progressive to 1080i HD. For 32-bit Windows Vista users only.

YouTube. Starting Wednesday, Google will provide approximately three hours of content each day from the Olympics Broadcasting Service on a channel dedicated to the games. The content will include highlight reels and daily wrap-ups, but no live coverage. The footage will be available in 77 territories, including South Korea, India and Nigeria, that aren’t officially covered by Olympic sponsors, according to an International Olympic Committee press release.

CCTVOlympics.com. CCTV will be supplying more than 5,000 hours of Olympic Games coverage for mainland China and Macau.

BBC Sports. The U.K.’s official Olympics broadcaster will offer six streaming channels showing coverage from BBC TV and BBC News Interactive. Channels will focus on on-demand daily highlights and athlete interviews.

Yahoo7. Australia’s official Olympics online portal offers live streams, video coverage on-demand and behind-the-scenes interviews, specials and features.

CBC Olympics. Canadians can tune into the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation online for supplemental live streams, video coverage on-demand and behind-the-scenes interviews, specials and features.

In most of these cases, users in the United States will be blocked from viewing the footage on the non-NBC sites. But you may be able to view clips or streams from other countries if you use a proxy server located within that country, or if you can otherwise trick the streaming server into thinking you’re from a country where it’s allowed.

Here’s how you would do it, although personally, I think it’s more trouble than its worth.