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The 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics start tonight, notes the Washington Post. But if you’re among the 9 percent of U.S. households who have broadband but don’t subscribe to paid television, it will be nearly impossible to (legally) watch the games online this year.

That’s because while NBC is streaming all of the events live online, full access to the livestream will only be available to paying cable subscribers.

NBC Sports will live-stream every event of the 2014 Sochi Olympics. The Opening Ceremony on Feb. 7, however, will be reserved for primetime.

NBColympics is also on social media, of course, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. Gizmodo has 19 Sochi Olympians You Should Follow on Instagram.

Since the acquisition of NBCUniversal by Comcast in January 2011, NBCUniversal owns 19 broadcast/cable networks and more than 60 websites, to promote the upcoming Winter Games.

C/Net explains how to stream the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. To get started visit the NBC Olympics Web site and verify that you are an existing subscriber by entering your username and password. Service providers that have partnered with NBC include Xfinity, Time Warner Cable, Direct TV, Dish, Verizon FIOS, COX, Charter, AT&T U-verse, Optimum, Suddenlink, Mediacom, Cable One, WoW!, Brighthouse, and RCN, among many others.

AP.org, ESPN, USA Today, Washington Post and Russia Today have Olympics sites. C/Net reviews the top apps, while The Verge and Engadget have Olympic stories for nerds. The NY Times Firehose is a real-time live stream of photos from Sochi, and not just limited to images taken by Times employees. AdWeek has the numbers.

NBC paid $4.38 billion to the International Olympics Committee (IOC) in 2011 for the exclusive broadcasting privilege in the U.S. through 2020, so cord-cutters don’t have a lot of options. NBCUniversal paid $775 million for the media rights to the 2014 Sochi Olympics, but is all but certain to recoup the cost of its original investment.

NBC will endeavor to stream over 1,000 hours of live Olympic action on NBCOlympics.com, boosting its streaming capacity with partners like Adobe, Microsoft and Akamai.

NBC Sports is providing two mobile/tablet apps with live streaming content and up-to-the-minute news. An NBC Sports Live Extra app and a new NBC Olympics Highlights and Results app, both enabled by Adobe. In addition, customers can access digital-only original programming, including Gold Zone and Olympic Ice, which are exclusive video channels on NBCOlympics.com and the NBC Sports Live Extra apps.

Now in its fourth Olympics after debuting at the 2008 Beijing Games, NBCU’s Billion Dollar Lab will measure consumption of Sochi Olympics video content via TV, computer, mobile, and tablet in hopes of reaping insight into the everyday video-consuming habits of the average Joe.

The Gorki Media Center houses the International Broadcasting Center, which will serve as the main broadcast hub for the Games. It is expected to host more than 2,000 media representatives worldwide and more than 6,000 television and radio broadcasters from around 70 countries.

NBC is using mobile broadcasting facilities from NEP, and Avid’s Interplay Media Asset Management system. Server and media-asset–management (MAM) technologies moves files back and forth across the Atlantic via Level 3 circuits. About 288 TB of Avid Media Grid storage and 85 TB of EVS storage is on-site at NBC’s IBC operations, and more than 5.5 PB of archived material is in Stamford, CT.

Sony is supplying more than 70 Sony HD studio and portable field cameras as well as its F55 4K camera to capture footage at various venues.

Russia’s ANO Sports Broadcasting (Panorama) production company is using four 16-camera OB vans and seven ENG vehicles. The Russian telco Rostelecom will deliver feeds from Sochi to AT&T, which is supplying 55 HD feeds to the U.S. and 14 HD feeds back to Sochi from the U.S.

2014 Winter Olympics broadcasters include the BBC, CBC, CTV, Sky News, France 24, Al Jazeera, TeleSUR, Foxtel, Telefónica, European Broadcasting Union, Cable TV Hong Kong, NHK, All-Russian State Television, Swiss Broadcasting Corporation, and others. Personal live streams are available from Ustream, Justin.tv, LiveStream and others.

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