The big news here in the UK is that this is the first Olympics in recent times where the BBC has had to cede much of its coverage to Discovery - who own the pan-European Eurosport channel(s). Since the London games in 2012, the BBC has had commercial-free access to every minute of games footage. In 2012 there were something like 2,500 hours of coverage - much of it available via iPlayer (widely available here on Smart TVs, Amazon Fire TV sticks and everything else). But a few years ago, the IOC sold pan-European coverage to Discovery - minimising what local networks can show.
This wasn't exactly secret - if you're someone like me who follows the industry, you'd have known. But the wider public didn't know, and now have found that their viewing options are much more limited than they had been previously. It's worth noting that many European countries, including the UK, have a number of "Listed Events" - sports events that are legally required to be shown on free-to-air TV, on channels that are available to at least 95% of the population. That includes events like the World Cup. The BBC actually *had* full rights to the 2018 Winter Games and 2020 Summer Games, but traded some of them for continued free-to-air rights for 2022 and 2024 Games. By all accounts, the BBC managed to do a decent deal with Discovery to get 350 hours of coverage. The IOC only mandates that Discovery has to sub-licence 200 hours to local broadcasters. Anyway, all of this means that viewers used to spending hours just watching rowing/table-tennis/whatever-their-passion, now have a choice of just two sports at any given time, with the BBC forced to cut around as needed. That means we mostly follow British medal hopes, but it also means that it's hard to stay with a single event if there's a Brit doing well elsewhere. In the meantime, Eurosport, which is a pay channel and not available in most homes, has spun up 7 additional channels on top of the 2 it normally has, but so far its coverage has been patchy. They're doing the same job in multiple European languages, and I'm not sure they have the production staff to cope. Some of those channels at times have been completely silent, and coverage with zero commentary at all is quite regular (Surprising because I believe that the IOC makes available an English language S"world feed" that broadcasters can use if they don't have their own people to call the sport. Even NBC uses this audio for some minority interest sports). So if you're searching for a country to point your VPN at, you might be better off looking at Canada rather than the UK! What really baffles me about all this is how little promotion Discovery/Eurosport has done to promote their big Olympic offering. They paid a massive amount for the rights (there wasn't actually an auction, but the $1.5bn deal blew all the European public broadcasters out of the water), but you'd be hard pushed to see advertising. They've included the Olympics in their Discovery+ offering, but I'm not 100% sure that people who want to watch shark documentaries and reality shows about lumberjacks are a complete natural fit for sports coverage even if the Olympics do engage non-sports fans. Adam On Tue, Jul 27, 2021 at 5:07 AM M-D November <mdnovem...@gmail.com> wrote: > Along similar lines, the German women’s gymnastics team is competing in > unitards which include coverage for arms & legs, rather than the > “traditional” bikini cut leotard, seeking parity with the male gymnasts, > who wear regular shorts during floorex and long pants on other apparatus. > Biles has been quoted as saying, essentially, she prefers the leo because > it makes her legs look longer, but she supports what the German team is > doing. > > On Monday, July 26, 2021 at 3:33:45 PM UTC-4 PGage wrote: > >> There are still those bikinis for the beach volleyball women, but one has >> to think this is the last year for that, as it is increasingly absurd. >> There has been a lot of attention on social media about the Norwegian Beach >> Handball team (non-Olympic) who were recently fined for wearing shirts >> instead of bikini bottoms. >> >> -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "TVorNotTV" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to tvornottv+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/a8ed0947-8bdd-434c-af8a-3d22004fa12an%40googlegroups.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/a8ed0947-8bdd-434c-af8a-3d22004fa12an%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tvornottv+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/CAD_sJGAh1WV4Lhv8VmfjbAffGxOR%2BezB31yuV-6dEzcGTXyj4A%40mail.gmail.com.
