Sports TV Forum Paves Way for Olympic Success
As the countdown to the Beijing 2008 Olympics continues, preparations to ensure that China indeed fulfills its promise to - Build New Beijing! Host Great Olympics! - are gathering pace. Most recently, on 25th August at the inaugural China International Sports Television Forum, some 400 delegates and speakers, as well as more than 100 media from across China and around the world, discussed the long-term implications of the 2008 Olympics for the sports TV industry.
Top of the agenda at the forum co-organised by the Cable & Satellite Broadcasting Association of Asia and the China International Television Corp was the issue of rights protection.
The challenge for the sports broadcast industry is to harness the appeal of the event for the longer term and thereby do more than just unlock TV rights but also unlock the bigger prizes of advertising, merchandising and corporate sponsorship.
The central question being asked at the forum and elsewhere is how best to protect the interests of rights holders while at the same time exploiting the full potential of the new technologies that it is hoped the games will popularize in China and elsewhere.
NBC for example, has spent US$860 million to acquire rights to the 2008 Olympics and has earmarked another US$120 million for production and they like other rights owners will be seeking to protect their investment by ensuring that there will be no streaming of the Olympics on the internet.
According to Jiang He Ping, Chief executive officer of CCTV's sports channel (CCTV-5), China plans to have 10 channels devoted to covering the Olympics and will launch a channel in 2007 solely dedicated to publicizing the games. It is expected that during the 2008 Olympics, at least 10 CCTV channels will be involved in the game telecast. The total telecast time will be around 2500 hours.
New technologies to be employed at the games will include blue ray disk, mobile transmission and HDTV signals for the first time in Olympic history. CCTV-5 also outlined plans to develop new media, including wireless content and portals. IPTV and cable from broadband internet can also be utilised since such feeds can be localized and geographically controlled.
Past viewing figures point to a strong underlying interest in the Olympics in China. During the Athens Olympics 100 million viewers in China watched China in the women’s basketball finals and a total of 400 million viewers watched the replays. CCTV-5’s Mr. Jiang is on record as saying he expects China to surpass Sydney where 75% of the population watched the opening ceremony in 2000.
And then there is the international press corps to be dealt with. Speaking to CMM previously, Sun Wei Jie, Deputy Director of Media Operations at Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games (BOGOC) said that some 6,000 print reporters and photographers are expected to descend on Beijing to cover the Olympics, along with some 15,000 broadcasters. Beijing Olympics Broadcasting, a 50/50 JV between BOCOG and the broadcasting arm of the IOC, will be responsible for ensuring full and objective coverage of the event. Media organizations attending the games will, for the most part, not be permitted to bring their own equipment into events but on payment of fees will instead be allowed to use footage supplied by BOB.
In addition to the main press centre there will be smaller centres at every Olympic venue, in the media villages and in IOC headquarters located in the Beijing Hotel. Journalists will also be able to view the games in their hotel rooms via a system of 45 live channels that will provide complete coverage of all events going on at any one time.
China has already experienced a huge increase in sports programming and viewer appetite according to industry analysts. Data provided by CSM Media Research reveals that the quantity of sports programming is doubling every two years and each viewer is now watching 10 minutes of sports content a day, up from 3 minutes 5 years ago.
But how fast new technologies such as IPTV and internet multicasting will be embraced is still a subject of controversy. The success of the mass digitization project being driven by SARFT is far from assured and China will undoubtedly face challenges achieving critical mass as broadband tariffs are still relatively expensive together with challenges in billing and collecting subscriptions. Unfortunately, while events like the Sports TV forum can highlight some of the potential problems involved they cannot solve them alone.