NBC and partners are limiting. They didn't give people enough options to watch. If you want to watch highlights online, you shall at least through their portal, or partner up with Youtube. If you want to watch full events online you shall easily be able to without having paying Time Warner Cable.
Why? Would you rather have a TV tax like the rest of the world for "free" streaming of the events?
If you wanted to watch all the events, you could, provided you pay for it. NBC paid a lot of money for the rights, and cable providers pay for the rights to air the other 6 Olympic channels. Hell you could have paid $30 for a month of Vue, had access to the website, then canceled.
People need to stop bitching about how being a cord cutter makes it hard to watch sports. You have choices, you can choose not to pay for it, but then don't go and bitch about how terrible it is when you do.
If you wanted to watch things other than swimming(like me) you had options, but you chose to not exercise said options. You could watch every event live if you wanted, you just chose not too.
Also bitching about ads on free OTA broadcasts is stupid too... You think they paid $12 billion to give it away for free? The cable broadcasts actually had very few ad breaks and only in between the action as all the cable channels were live sports.
One last thing... Why do you think they had swimming, track and gymnastics on the main channel at Primetime? It's what most Americans want to see at the time when the most are watching.