CBC/Radio-Canada gets rights to 2014/2016 Olympics
Firstly, congratulations to CBC/Radio-Canada. It must be exciting news for their team to know that they are headed to Sochi and Rio to cover the greatest multi-sporting event ever.
Personally as an Olympic fan in Canada, I take this news with mixed feelings.
Ultimately I would have preferred that Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium in its present state for Vancouver/London take on the next two games.
Realizing Rogers will back out of the agreement after London 2012, the next best alternative would have been for a Bell/CBC joint bid. It’s too bad that option didn’t work out either.
It is likely that CBC will need to partner up with another media entity due to schedule/time constraints. We’ll have to see how that plays out.
I am a big fan of the Consortium’s multi-platform coverage spread out over internet, mobile, radio (which I don’t listen to) and TV; it really has been unprecedented and quite impressive.
When the Olympics were on CBC, I had to tune to NBC 50% of the time to get a different perspective, or to see if they were covering different sports. This meant that I couldn’t always get a Canadian perspective on the events I was watching.
With the Consortium’s coverage, particularly for the summer games, I can stream from the office, or when at home, tune into Sportsnet, V, TSN/2, RDS/2, CTV or even OMNI and a different set of events will be covered, all with a Canadian (and multilingual) perspective — *and* all without ever having to watch NBC.
I wonder how CBC is going to be able to pull of coverage like the Consortium’s?
CBC doesn’t have a dedicated sports channel. Bold has been known to show some sports, but it isn’t a “sports” channel.
CBC’s other properties will have to digress from their regular content (usually arts, culture, documentary, news) to show sports, at the expense of their regular viewers who likely don’t care about the Olympics.
CBC’s current streaming experience is decent, but needs a lot of work to be on par with Bell’s. CBC will need to have a good network backbone to cover the comprehensive event streaming that is required for the Olympics in order to match the level of coverage by the Consortium’s.
The budget cutbacks and constraints suffered by Canada’s public broadcaster are worrisome, and seem to conflict with the apparent need for CBC to ramp up its broadcasting talent in preparation for comprehensive coverage of an event like the Olympics.
In the end, as an Olympic fan, I need to have coverage as good as or better than what the Consortium is doing now.
Is CBC up to the task? I hope so. We shall see.
