I've been watching a lot of professional cycling lately and it is unfortunately not the most scrutable sport to view.
So how do I keep up with racing, without spending 4 hours with the livestream in the background? Often this depends on how much time I have to watch a race. This is with the caveat that I live in a timezone where I watch most races 6-12hours after they've concluded.
I have 30mins-1hr to watch the stage
How Far Out is a twitter account that helpfully tells you which sections of a day's race are interesting to watch. This is useful if you want to watch the actual race for yourself without heavy analysis and can often be more exciting due to spoilers often in recap videos/thumbnails. I use this when I really want to simulate the experience of seeing what happens live.
Tell me what happened in <10mins
Lanterne Rouge to the rescue, for those time-strapped (and even if you watch the whole stage), Patrick Broe of the Lanterne Rouge Youtube channel often has some of the best recaps of races with explanations of tactics and strategy being employed in the races. Patrick often explanations of strategy, actions taken by riders that I've completely missed. The disadvantage is that he doesn't have recaps of all races due to rights issues/time, but he has most of the big ones.
I have no time for videos, give me text
Beyond the Peloton has great recaps of races (with GIFs) for the fastest way to catch up on what happened along with strategy notes.