If you are planning on watching the Olympics this winter, you won’t have to look very far down the “guide” button on your remote to find a television network that isn’t playing an event. This is usually a result of Canadian and American networks both having programming on your cable or satellite provider. However, pay special attention this winter to how many Canadian networks you see giving hours of coverage for the Olympics in under two weeks.
For the first time since 1996 in Canadian Olympic television history, CBC will not be Canada’s national broadcasting rights holder for the games. This was slightly surprising to the uninformed public, including CBC, but made complete sense for two reasons. Before we get to these, here is the breakdown of how the Vancouver 2010 and London 2012 broadcasting rights will be distributed.
CTV takes over as the top network to control the Olympic Games for the next four years. Within these four years, CTV will determine all Olympic coverage for their affiliate networks, like TSN and OMNI. Furthermore, CTV and Rogers have struck a deal allowing Sportsnet to also show Olympic coverage.
The two reasons starts here. The first aspect is the financial side of the Olympic Games. In an article posted on CBC’s website in 2005, Nancy Lee, head of CBC sports at the time, noted, “We’re very disappointed, no question. We think we put in a great bid. We worked long on it. It was a good bid. We couldn’t have worked harder on it and we were just clearly outbid on it.” Outbid in deed.
The winning bid, which involved a 110 percent increase from the 2006 Olympic Games, cost CTV and their affiliates $153 million, up from $73 million just four years prior. Compared to the 1998 Winter Olympic Games in Calgary, where CTV spent only $4.5 million in total, this is a shocking number. All in all, CBC claims that they had to be fiscally responsible to its taxpayers to host the games.
The second aspect is the number of people that can now watch the Olympic Games. Through all the networks, TSN and Sportsnet will have all 353 channels (slight over-exaggeration) playing Olympic coverage. TSN, TSN2, TSN HD, TSN EXTRA, TSN MOBILE, TSN.ca, Sportsnet East, Ontario, West, and Pacific, Sportsnet HD and Sportsnet.ca will all have places for fans to watch the Olympic Games, which beats anything the competition had to offer. During the bidding process, HD was just beginning to pick up intensity and many networks were not on the bandwagon yet. And just remember, I only listed two networks alone in this paragraph showing Olympic events, we did not even mention CTV.
Overall, the Olympic Games’ television rights may not really matter to most people. It is big business fighting massive corporations over greed. However, in 50 years when someone picks up this article, it will be amazing to see how much things have changed cost-wise like it has in the past 50 years. At least no one will be able to say they couldn’t find the remote; it is on every channel.
6:06 PM
Well, it’s not exactly everywhere. There are a large number of people in Southeast Michigan who see CBC Windsor either broadcast on channel 9 or repeated on our local cable systems. CTV has no broadcast station in Windsor and their station in London isn’t carried on cable.
The US NBC network coverage is absolutely horrible by comparison with what we used to enjoy from the CBC. It’s heavily edited, generally shown by tape delay, and rarely shows anyone but the Americans and the very top competitors. Oh, and forget curling – you won’t find it.
Many people in the States are, therefore, mourning the loss of the Olympics from the CBC schedule.