Watch the Winter Olympics on your Surface with the NBC Sports Live Extra app

There is a 12 hour time difference between Sochi, Russia and Seattle where I live, and despite the proliferation of screens at home, it’s hard to find time to watch the Winter Olympics. Enter the NBC Sports Live Extra App and my Surface 2 – which goes everywhere with me. This is a great app that lets me catch anything I missed or quickly pull up video to show something amazing to a friend.

The app itself is free, and the navigation is very simple – a scrollable menu of main events, a guide to live and upcoming events, highlights, and finally full event replays. Unlimited access to all of the streaming content does require that you login using your cable or satellite provider credentials, though the process is very easy. You can also stream 30 minutes of content without signing in, in which case you’ll see a small ticker in the upper right corner of the screen letting you know how much time you have left.

On launching the app I easily found the full replay of the men’s snowboarding slopestyle finals, which was amazing. The video loads quickly and the quality is brilliant – it also helps that the weather for this event was perfect.

Besides event coverage, there are tons of the extras that make Olympics coverage so compelling – explanations of individual sports, historical pieces from past games, interviews with athletes – even a Today Show story on the Russian Police Chorus everyone is talking about.

As with all great Windows 8 apps, you can run it side-by-side with a second app – Twitter in this case – so you don’t miss a thing.

Every Olympics there are a few incredible moments that I watch over and over again. Now I’ve got them with me wherever I go. Today the men’s snowboarding halfpipe finals are on. There is now virtually no chance that I’ll miss them.

Dan Laycock

Senior Manager – Microsoft Surface

* Please note: The vast majority of live streaming content on NBC Sports Live Extra will only be available to authenticated cable, satellite and telco customers via TV Everywhere. Further instructions are provided in the app settings section. NBC Olympics video is only accessible in the U.S. and certain U.S. territories.