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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.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday June 30 2015, @11:34AM
you could hear the event, but the commentators were gone. What a relief!
I used to follow american football, its probably the most interesting of the ball games, however the puddle is very shallow so I got bored of it. Anyway its not unheard of for people to mute the TV because the video commentators are pretty much morons designed to appeal to drunks in bars, and listen to the radio coverage while watching the TV. The radio guys pretend to appeal to car drivers who optimistically are not drunk, so instead of spending most of their time hooting like monkeys they actually talk about the game is a clear and concise manner.
see how many people actually want to watch them
They're filler. They mean they wanted to sell a beer commercial but couldn't get the dough, so now you have to sit thru 60 seconds of idiocy. They have to put something in there.
A lot of it is short attention span production issues. I remember seeing some games in the 80s where there might be 5-10 seconds of just listening to the fans cheer, kind of like a shitcom laugh track. That is gone now, unless some idiot is talking hes not earning his millions. There are aspects of dysfunctional corporation in that, too. Another production issue thats pretty annoying is video game style animation, something shiny and bright has to be animated and moving continuously, which makes it super annoying to watch.
Someday, someone with a vast array of FPGAs is going to make what amounts to ad block for TV that doesn't just eat commercials as a batch process like mythtv does, but eats animations and stupid stuff like that in real time.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday June 30 2015, @06:22PM
But in today's digital time, that gives you the risk of the radio commentator "predicting" the game because the TV delay is larger than the radio delay.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday June 30 2015, @08:23PM
Even in the "olden days" you'd run into issues with satellite delays if the TV went half way across the country over a satellite and back thats nearly a second but the radio for in state local games was a microwave link.
Anyway worst case it felt like a newscast. Live you'd see the ball get handed to somebody then hear "handed to #63" but this way you'd hear "handed to 63" while it was being handed to 63 which was OK. Far better than listening to the TV sportscasters who think grunting is top quality news reporting, anyway.
The most disconcerting part was the cheering. Crowd does wild means he caught it while you're seeing the ball maybe 10 feet still in the air. Dead silence means he dropped it. Dead silence after the play means in a fraction of a second you're about to see a ref throw a flag.
(Score: 2) by skater on Tuesday June 30 2015, @06:40PM
A couple years back I caught a rebroadcast of an old Ohio State-Michigan football game. I don't know who the play-by-play guy was, but the color guy was another college football coach. It was awesome to watch - they didn't talk too much, they just let the plays develop, and they said a few things about it as needed, then shut up again. (I do like having the score, clock, etc. on the screen all the time, though. It was weird waiting for a commercial break to see the score.)
Years ago, I came across an old MAD Magazine that had a send-up of in-depth football coverage. For a while I didn't get the joke - of course they have sideline reporters and people reporting on the weather and so on... then I realized that I wasn't getting the joke because TV coverage of the game wasn't always that way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2015, @11:20PM
In my opinion, radio announcers in general are better than their TV counterparts because they have to describe the game. TV announcers add comments to the action while radio announcers have to describe the action. I used to regularly turn down the TV and turn up the radio whenever possible. The best sports announcers ever are the ones who were in, or came up through radio.