How Nine will cover the London Olympics better
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By Jason Cave, 27 Aug 2008 The Crowd is a Roar Pro
- Tagged:
- Beijing Olympics, commentators, Olympic Games, Olympics
Channel Nine will take over the Olympic Games TV rights from Seven in time for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada in 2010, and then for the ‘big one’ in London, 2012.
But seeing Seven made a real mess of the Beijing Olympics telecast, what can Nine do to make it better than what Seven did in Beijing?
Here are my thoughts:
1) Do away with the ‘magazine-style’ format. It was okay for earlier Olympics, but it’s now gone.
2) Televise every event LIVE and uninterrupted, even if it does clash with either their news service or NRL commitments.
3) Pick the commentators who have in-depth knowledge of the sport they are calling, not those who had no idea of the sport or the athlete they are calling, which is what Seven did with some of their commentators in Beijing, with the exception of Bruce McAvaney and Phil Liggett.
4) Don’t bring people over for ‘cross-promotion’, which is what Seven did. If Nine is to be fair-dinkum about bringing the Olympics live to people all over Australia, then select those who want to be totally committed to the Games telecast – not those who are there just to have a good time.
5) Treat every athlete from every country with equal respect, not just those who are representing Australia. There are other countries who are participating in the Olympics, as well.
6) Don’t put too many ads in!
7) Respect the Olympic Games, its traditions, and the host city.
Let’s hope we see a much better Games telecast from Nine/Fox Sports in London 2012 than the disaster that was Seven’s Olympic telecast in Beijing.
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sheek said | August 27th 2008 @ 11:24am | Report comment
Jason,
I’m not a fan of channel 9, I like them even less than channel 7 usually. But Nine usually broadcast sport better than Seven. Although when you see the inhouse promotional ads Nine show during the cricket & rugby league, don’t expect them to be much different to Seven in the ads department.
Whether Nine wil learn from the critiscism levelled at Seven remains to be seen. However, when a broadcaster knows it has exclusive rights, it knows it has a captive audience. And that gives them the right to run things as they wish.
You want to see the Olympics/ Then cop it as the exclusive broadcaster wishes to present it.
Mind you, my favourite Olympics was Barcelona in 1992. And I reckon Seven did a great job back then. Unfortunately, everyone gets greedy, &/or careless over time.
dasilva said | August 27th 2008 @ 5:01pm | Report comment
The only way you’ll get a good broadcast of olympics is to give it to ABC and SBS who are non-commercial stations. However that is impossible due to money involve. I guess we have to settle for ads and uninform commentators as I don’t believe channel 9 is any better than channel 7
the truth said | August 28th 2008 @ 10:14am | Report comment
9 will be just as bad as 7 just look t the formers appalling coverage of the Commonwealth games (Ray Warren calling the swimming-please).
And remember th channel 9 covrage of the Albertville winter olympics that was packaged as a magazine style show some 15 hours after the event had been run
Let us look at what they did to the Ashes cricket an event that comes live from London once every 4 years First they do not show the first session as it interferes with repeats of American series
Second they just don’t care enought o show it live anyway.
I hope that foxtel show the lions share of it 24 hours a day on a number of channels.
Dawson said | August 28th 2008 @ 7:51pm | Report comment
Live and uninterrupted?!? So you would show all two hours of a cycling race? What they should do is to be live but keep going around the grounds as something more interesting comes up. ie climax of something , Aussie competing, big upset about to happen.
Millster said | September 8th 2008 @ 5:10pm | Report comment
Having just come back from Beijing, point number 5 is an important one for me.
What I experienced there was the ‘other end of the stick’ of parochial TV broadcasting choices. We had no less than 5 channels of CCTV (the Chinese TV network) showing live olympics 24/7, so plenty of space you would think. However…
1. A massive bias to those events in which China was expected to dominate; and/or
2. In all events a massive bias to the Chinese participants such that even if they put in a mediocre performance they got as much focus as the event medallists.
Until I left the country, it was simply impossible for me to know from the local media which Australian or French (my two nationalities) athletes had medalled.
This is not at all a dig at the Chinese media. But its just interesting for once to be on the receiving end of such parochial, populist media decision-making. Sad thing is, I know we are just as bad if not worse and it makes me cringe at what we offered to our foreign guests in 2000.
Oh, and to Dawson, yes I would show all 2 hours of a cycling race. To anyone who knows anything about the sport, showing the last 30 seconds is as meaningless as showing the last 30 seconds of a game of football or tennis. I’m with ‘the truth’ – give the bulk of it to Fox (and SBS for football and cycling), with limited rights to the hyped up events / sob-story moments / magazine stuff to the FTA commercial networks to satisfy the plebs and New Idea readers. In any case, in a few years the Olympics will be brought by Yahoo, Microsoft or Google and you’ll get broadband feed live and uninterrupted of each and every event on a pay-per-view basis so this discussion will thankfully be obsolete.