BBC Olympics – watch the games on your mobile [App of the week]
What is the BBC Olympics app?
As the ‘Olympic broadcaster’ the BBC has released an app providing quick access to all the latest news and information from the games, as well as access to live streaming.
The app is designed to help you to keep up-to-date on all that’s happening at the games over 3G or wi-fi.
The app is free to download from the following links for Android and iPhone – a simple version of the app is also available for BlackBerry.
For more recommendations read our app reviews.
5 things we like about the BBC Olympics app
- You can watch up to 24 different live streams
The choice of up to 24 different live streams at the busiest times gives you complete choice over what you want to watch. This means no matter how obscure your chosen event is you should be able to get live coverage of it. - Find out what events are coming up with the schedule
A full schedule makes it easy to see when each event starts and what is on each day. Once the games start this schedule will start filling up with results so you can quickly find out who won what. - It’s updated with all the latest news from the BBC
All the news from the BBC Sport website will be fed into the app so all the latest information will be available in one place. There will also be videos and highlights available through the app, as well as a medals table to see how each country is doing. - There’s a page for every sport, country and even athlete
There are individual pages for every sport, country and athlete so no matter who you are supporting you can get all the information easily. - It’s free and there’s no ads
As you would expect from the BBC, the app is totally free and there’s not even ads to get in the way when you are using the app.
Tim’s impressions of the BBC Olympics app
As an app for keeping up-to-date with the news surrounding the games it does well, but doesn’t add anything particularly special. Where it should come into its own is streaming live events.
Having a choice of 24 different feeds means you should always be able to watch the sport you’re interested in and the fact you can stream video either over 3G or wi-fi means you can catch the action wherever you are – dependent on your signal anyway.
I tried it on Team GB’s opening women’s football game against New Zealand and there were the occassional buffering issues over 3G – likely more to do with signal than the app – plus at one point the sound and images lost synchronisation – but overall it performed well.
How it will stand up to the most popular events and busiest times remains to be seen, but on first impressions it seems pretty stable.
My only concern is how much data will be used when streaming games over 3G. If you don’t have a generous data allowance this could easily add up to a surprisingly large bill, so we would strongly recommend that you only stream over a wi-fi hotspot when it is available.
Overall, it is a well put together app and particularly impressive considering you don’t have to pay for it or put up with annoying ads taking up valuable screen space.
- App reviews – get more app recommendations from Which?
- Mobile phone reviews – see which models performed best in our lab tests
- Tablet reviews – find the best performing tablets
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Mick
It’s a shame that that it will not work with this Galaxy Tab. 2 10.1
I suppose that it is because the Apple store got it banned from in the US, and the Play. Store, does not realise that other parts of the world. still get to play with the superior to toys.