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Discovery Outbids National Broadcasters for Olympics

posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday June 30 2015, @08:10AM   Printer-friendly
from the five-rings-to-rule-them-all dept.

slash2phar writes:

From the Guardian:

Discovery has paid $1.45 billion for the European (excluding Russia) rights to the Olympic Games starting in 2018, bumping off national broadcasters including the BBC, which have long held them. It's a major coup for the U.S. broadcaster as it looks to take a bigger part of the foreign TV market.

The Discovery chief executive, David Zaslav, told the Guardian that it would negotiate with the BBC and other broadcasters in the UK, France and Germany over potentially sub-licensing some of the rights.

"Part of our approach will be to strive to work with some of the best Olympic broadcast players. The BBC will have the chance to sub-licence some of the rights. We'll open up those discussions in every market," he said.

This sizable deal builds on a $7.5 billion no-bid contract signed last year by the US based NBC to broadcast the Olympics through 2032 in the United States.

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by bootsy on Tuesday June 30 2015, @09:21AM

    by bootsy (3440) on Tuesday June 30 2015, @09:21AM (#203254)

    The Olympics is a protected event under UK Broadcasting regulations so it has to appear on free to air aka terrestial television. That means that either Discovery have to buy a free view channel or they lease it back to the main UK broadcasters.

    I personally won't have a problem with the BBC not disrupting its schedule to show the Olympics as I don't want my license money spent on sports broadcasting.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2015, @07:03PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2015, @07:03PM (#203438)

    Or they could create a low power (LPTV) station, which will only be received by very few people...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-power_broadcasting [wikipedia.org]

  • (Score: 2) by mojo chan on Wednesday July 01 2015, @07:55AM

    by mojo chan (266) on Wednesday July 01 2015, @07:55AM (#203661)

    This raises some interesting questions. Will the BBC just get highlights? Or a simple live feed from Discovery with Discovery commentators and advert breaks?

    Will it even be in HD? Japan is planning to do the first 8k broadcast for their summer games in 2020. Freeview is crowded and space for HD channels is not cheap.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)