The Sport Thread

I realize that, but what I was getting at what would stop NBC from having a Sky show airing in the US that’s simulcast in the UK? It may not use Olympic footage but as it could be a NBC show that say could profile international Olympians and scores. It’s not really different than other broadcasters outside the village.

The access and Interviews of athletes are almost certainly dealt with in the same way as the rights to the coverage. Zero chance a non rights holder could air the same as a rights holder.

Not quite, but they'd have to wait a while and it would have to be outside the 'OIympic Domain' (parks and other venues).

In terms of UK athletes who win medals there is a specific media plan, I can't remember the exact name but it's something like 'Managing Victory' that applies after the mixed zone and medal ceremony.

Not sure what will have changed with Discovery being the chief rights holder, but the way it worked in London and Rio was that BBC TV (Sport) got first dibs on a sit down (sofa type) interview, then BBC Radio (Sport). After that the athlete would go to 'Team GB House' - a location set up by the British Olympic Committee (also used for PR meetings). That was when non rights holders could interview the athletes. The BBC would often also be there to get some more reaction.

If BBC News wanted an interview they might be able to get something in the mixed zone, or grab a quick word before or after one of the sport interviews, if not they could at Team GB House. Of course they could also clip the BBC Sport interviews, but the advantage of anything shot 'outside the fence' was that it could go on BBC World too.

So NBC have paid billions of dollars for rights, only then to spend money producing a programme that contains none of the footage or access they've paid for?

What would stop them is that it isn't just event footage that's restricted - it's anything filmed in the 'Olympic Domain' - inside venues and the Olympic Park. Even Press Conference footage can only be used by non rights holders after a certain period of time has passed. They can't take them live.

In addition other than during London 2012 you can pretty much watch Sky Sports News during the Olympics and be unaware they're actually on - at that time of year they're generally more concerned about who might be turning up to sign for West Brom.

No - and there's no suggestion that Sky would be broadcasting Olympic content. This is purely a suggestion that NBC/Comcast would use Sky facilities and/or personnel to produce coverage for broadcast in the US. That makes total sense for Comcast - if you have Sky staff and facilities that are on down-time, why not use them to make output for other areas of your business (namely NBC)? Why pay for additional equipment and production staff when you already have them available to you?

There has been no suggestion that Sky would be able to broadcast this material in the UK or Europe (where they hold no rights)

Why would NBC in the US want to broadcast a UK show about the Olympics with no Olympic coverage within it, when they have spent literally billions on rights? That's a kind of bizarre proposition?

It would be far more likely that Sky facilities and production staff on downtime would be used by Comcast to make content purely for NBC US outlets. The Olympic Summer Games are traditionally staged when Sky have fewer sporting events to cover - so it makes sense to use Sky's staff and facilities. It will be interesting to see if they do much remote production/presentation using UK facilities and crew/production staff, or whether they use them for back-office stuff like event logging etc.

Exactly. It looks as if NBC are using Sky UK's resources to assist them with their coverage.

8 years ago Sky loaned out 24 of their playout chains and uplinks to the BBC for the 2012 red button stuff. That didn't make Sky able to suddenly be an Olympic broadcaster!

I was just assuming/suggesting that they could do a show as ESPN and other sports networks have done interviews and shows complete shows about the Olympics while using little to no footage here in the US. They managed to do it with using photographs.

Well, it is a fact that in 2004, 2008 and 2016, the Olympics were held during the football season, and the Premier League does generate a lot of news and is the main reason people have Sky by a million miles, so it wasn't so ridiculous they gave that priority. Not the case in 2012 and indeed in these Games, so Sky Sports News will probably talk about them more. But of course they'll also have Sky News covering them as a news story, and they'd be more likely to use their resources and personnel than they would NBC's, I would think.



Well, it's not an entirely ridiculous suggestion because I remember during the 2010 World Cup that ESPN UK did a daily show from South Africa, despite not having any rights to the World Cup, with their regular presenters and pundits taking part for chat and features and so on, and presumably piggy-backing off the resources ESPN US had there. But it's a bit different in the World Cup because ESPN covered plenty of other football over the season so they had a permanent team doing it and an archive of clips they could use to illustrate the points. But the audience was probably tiny, and there's no equivalent with the Olympics because Sky don't regularly cover a lot of the Olympic sports, so nobody's going to be expecting Sky to do anything.

In addition, even though the football season won't be going on during the Olympics this time, there'll be plenty of other sport, with cricket, golf, F1 and rugby league all in full swing, all of which Sky show loads of, so they won't be scrabbling around for material.

Just discovered a Fourth round Coppa Italia match live on BTSX2 now (Wed 25 Nov 2020 @ 15000, I haven't seen any promotion for this, and am wondering whether I'm the only one watching.

There are reports Diego Maradona has died