Eurosport - Home Of The Olympics

Done it again...

Eurosport getting their Koreas mixed up.



Gangneung, where this takes place, is in South Korea.

Their website has also been known to mix up Slovenia and Slovakia.

NBC finally doing what they should have years ago and planning to air games live "coast to coast" in the US - well the prime time coverage anyway.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-olympic-live-coverage-20170328-story.html

I'm waiting for people to complain that the former primetime events are now dayside and they miss them because they are at work.

Good news for US viewers, however this may mean NBC lobbying Games' organisers even harder to schedule key events to suit a US prime-time audience. E.g. the article above mentions that the Figure Skating - usually an evening event - will take place in the mornings in Korea. Great for US prime-time. Middle of the night in Europe.

Although far below what NBC are paying the IOC now have Discovery / Eurosport as a significant single rights holder. In some markets (Germany for example) they are the exclusive broadcaster, so they may have a few things to say. Of course the IOC will listen to NBC instead, but they may have a stronger voice than individual European broadcasters would have done - no doubt (on their behalf) the EBU may have made comments in the past.

Traditionally the Asian hosts have been quite accomodating to NBCs requests though agree it is somewhat unfair on certainly the Asian broadcasters and to a lesser extent the European broadcasters where whether it's middle of the night or middle of the day it's somewhat inconvenient - in our case the next three games will certainly fall out of primetime so somewhat ironically although we'll have live coverage there is an argument to go down the NBC route.

Indeed with the BBC's limited rights now having sold the family silver I'd actually quite like to see them air a primetime block of 2-3 hours with more "as live" coverage rather than just a highlights show, which in recent times has become more of a chat show with brief clips. I don't know how the one channel + one stream deal affects content outside of live hours but certainly hope the red button stream shows content out of live hours (a mixture of key highlights and unbroadcast events) and it would be good that if BBC2 show highlights from 7-9pm for example that they could use the old BBC3 slot for further coverage until the live action begins from 9pm. I suspect to that BBC2 will probably have an afternoon slot where overnight events like the figure skating might be shown - especially as they'll probably concentrate on the snow sports live.

Also how does this deal affect on demand content - are they limited to showing what they have broadcast live or could they stick up all sessions in full say by the evening. I'd be surprised if they could but given the time difference that might sweeten the deal.

I seem to remember the imprsssion given when the deal was announced was that on demand / online content was limited to that which had been broadcast on the linear channel plus the 'stream'. There didn't seem to be a (reported) limit on the number of hours, just the number of channels- so there is the potential to run plenty of action later.

It really was a poor deal struck by the BBC considering the hand they had to play.

Giving up so much to a European organisation and paying a massive fee just so it appears that in the future they can give the public what they want when in reality it is a massively watered down deal and ultimately the public will have to pay for things they take for granted. It's almost a metaphor for something.

Is the commentary by Eurosport, for this weeks China Open snooker, being done off tube in Feltham, or at the venue in Beijing?

Eurosport Player is now available on AppleTV.