High Speed Satellite Internet and the Future of Olympic Broadcasting

Yesterday I was reading an article on the history of Olympic television coverage. As some might know, the 1932 Olympics was the first television program to ever be broadcast using satellites. It wasn’t until the 1960’s when United States viewers started getting live coverage of the games. In the 1990’s, CBS started using additional cable outlet’s to give viewers more viewing opportunities for their winter Olympic broadcasts. Then in 2004, NBC took the next step and expended their coverage even more with 24 hour-a-day coverage on their family of cable networks. Now, in 2010, coverage has again expanded thanks to high speed satellite internet as many of the events are now being streamed live on the internet.

For the Olympics, this seemed like the next logical step. For as much as the Olympic movement is steeped in tradition and aren’t as open to change as some might want it to be, they do love to update technologically. The Olympics is big money and the IOC makes a lot of it selling broadcasting rights for their games. While NBC, the primary broadcaster for the games and the exclusive US broadcaster, utilizes highlights on their NBCOlympics.com website, they keep their live broadcasting for their afternoon and prime time coverage, which gets big numbers for their advertisers. For Olympic lovers it has always been a complaint that they rarely get to see full coverage of events. NBC focuses almost exclusively on US competitors and usually focus on just their performances.

While NBC is slowly learning how to utilize the internet for their coverage, other broadcasters, have fully embraced internet broadcast for the Olympics. CTV, the Canadian broadcaster for the Vancouver games, are broadcasting all events live on their website. Unfortunately for US viewers online, the coverage is blacked out for anyone on this side of the boarder (that is NBC’s doing). The same goes for the European coverage. The European Union broadcaster allows views in EU countries to watch most events live online, though they are not available for viewing in the US.

Next year, the International Olympic Committee will take bids on which United States network will provide coverage of the summer and winter Olympic Games beginning in 2014. NBC, FOX and an joint ABC/ ESPN bid are all in the running to broadcast the next four Olympic games with the winning network paying over a billion dollars for the privilege. Whether or not the next broadcaster will incorporate internet coverage into their package is yet to be seen, but chances are as the net becomes more relevant in live broadcasts, we will see more live streaming Olympic coverage in the United States.