Olympics: a TV show for five billion people
TOTAL: 7 000 hours of content beamed out
If you tuned into the Olympics, on television or your smartphone, then you belong to a multibillion-dollar club of five billon people.
As the International Olympic Committee launches its Olympic Channel, here are five things to know about the biggest broadcasting operation on the planet, a combination of technology and business being raised by the digital revolution to ever new levels.
Broadcasting Bolt
From New York to Tokyo and Buenos Aires to London, people all over the world tuned in for the few seconds it took Jamaica’s Usain Bolt to run the 100m.
To make that happen, the signal was sent by the Olympic Broadcasting Services, which is under control of the International Olympic Committee, and sent to four satellites, then beamed back down.
More than 7 000 technicians in blue T-shirts work in a centre resembling mission control, with the walls covered in screens, to deliver footage from the Games filmed by 1 200 camera operators. More than 7 000 hours of content were beamed around the world.
$3.5 BILLION BUSINESS
The Olympics is about money as much as sport and one major exchange of money is in selling broadcast rights. The rights-holders, as they are known, pay a premium for exclusive transmission of the Games. Non rights-holders are not even allowed to bring cameras into Olympic competition sites.
Although this exclusivity is shared among many different outlets, each tailors the content to its local market. TV channels in Brazil or China or Jamaica provide a very different experience, focusing on their own athletes and favoured sports to ensure a maximum audience – and maximum price tag for commercials run alongside.
“Revenue for transmission rights keeps going up. At Rio, it came to more than $3.5 billion,” said Yiannis Exarchos, CEO of Olympic broadcasting.
That business, plus sponsorship, oils the financial wheels of the huge sporting extravaganza. About nine percent of the rights revenues go to the IOC and the rest to international sporting federations and national Olympic committees.
“The world of sport, other than in a few very profitable disciplines, would have a lot of difficulty to survive without this,” Exarchos said.
DIGITAL OLYMPICS
Exarchos said Rio was the first Internet Games, where online viewership has been “as big a factor as television”.
After four days of competition in Rio, more people had watched Olympic images online than during the entire Olympics in London four years ago.
IOC president Thomas Bach said that NBC, which has the US rights, had recorded more than 2.25 billion live stream minutes on its website.
The digital revolution, in which tablets, cellphones and computers take on television, once seemed a big threat to the traditional broadcasters.
However, Exarchos said that things are settling down. “Today, most (broadcasters) have their own digital platforms and we see that they’re using these to bring the public to their traditional channels. Digital feeds traditional TV and vice versa,” he said.
The newer factor is the “very aggressive emergence of some media, especially on social networks, that are completely changing the environment and represent a risk to traditional media”, he said.
FUTURE OLYMPICS
Rio is already being used as a test ground for future Olympics. Japan’s NHK channel has run tests in the 8K format, which is 16 times clearer than today’s HD images. On a cinema screen the 100m race appears in incredibly sharp definition, giving the viewer the sensation of being there.
There is also virtual reality technology under development.
A prototype in which special glasses are linked to a network of cameras in the Olympic swimming pool gives the viewer the ability to see something different with a turn of the head, as if he were seated in the arena.
In a few years it is expected that the goggles will put the viewer into the centre of the action without leaving his sofa.
Empty stadiums?
If broadcast technology gets that good vice-president in charge of sound technology research and development at Dolby’s, who will go through the expense and hassle of taking a plane and buying tickets to attend the Games?
Will athletes of the future compete in empty stadiums? “No,” says Exarchos.
“Nothing replaces the emotion of being there.”