Tv Sports
By RICHARD SANDOMIR
Published: June 5, 2011
NBC?s Olympic reign could end Tuesday in a hotel in Lausanne, Switzerland, when it faces ESPN and Fox in an auction for the rights to the 2014 and 2016 Games.
They are familiar opponents from eight years ago, when NBC handily outbid them for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games and next year?s Summer Olympics in London.
The International Olympic Committee would certainly like to repeat the no-doubt-about-it outcome of eight years ago, when NBC?s $2.2 billion bid (including its parent company General Electric?s Olympic sponsorship) beat Fox?s $1.3 billion offer.
But that outcome is not likely. Each network ? none of which truly needs the Olympics ? might be calculating the least it can bid to win, not how much would be a knockout blow.
Much has changed for NBC since 2003, enough to make ESPN and Fox believe they could win in Lausanne. First, NBC lost $223 million on its Vancouver broadcast.
Second, the corporate treasury that will be tapped for NBC?s bid is Comcast?s, not General Electric?s. Third, Dick Ebersol, the head of NBC Sports and its leading Olympic advocate to his bosses at G.E., resigned last month.
And ESPN and Fox are promising something that NBC, under Ebersol, never would: each would carry everything live, across all their media platforms. Ebersol built toward prime time with the most popular sports, even if it meant lengthy tape delays.
When NBC began to stream events online three years ago in Beijing, some were not available live. In Vancouver, only two sports were streamed live.
In proposing to remove the shackles from live coverage, ESPN?s and Fox?s two-front challenge reflects a modern view of Olympic event consumption. In the Twitter Age, Fox and ESPN know, it is more difficult than ever to prevent fans from knowing results almost instantaneously. So, they say, why not deliver the events live?
Still, they intend to produce a taped recap for prime time, just as NBC has.
David Hill, the chairman of the Fox Sports Media Group, sees no reason for the live approach to fail. His rationale is that despite the increased Olympic programming that NBC has carried throughout the day and on different media, the Summer Games and the Winter Games are still huge events that attract tens of millions of viewers in prime time.
Referring to advertisers, he said, ?The big bucks are still where the eyeballs are.?
Still, after bidding $1.3 billion eight years ago, will he risk more this time around?
In describing ESPN?s live plan, John Skipper, ESPN?s executive vice president for content, said: ?The question is, will you still garner those huge, very big network prime-time ratings, and I think the answer is yes. We?re not suggesting that you?ll beat the prime-time rating by running figure skating at 9:30 a.m., but we?re suggesting that it will not damage the prime-time rating.?
ESPN will certainly tell the I.O.C. that its experience in televising the World Cup last year from South Africa, often at very early hours, shows its strong commitment to live coverage of a major international sports event. But that was one sport, not the dozens, with all their fan constituencies, that comprise the Olympics.
In remarks made on the day he resigned, Ebersol characteristically questioned the business wisdom of carrying viewer-grabbing Olympic events live before prime time.
?There are others who want to put it up live at 4 a.m. and did it last year with the World Cup that averaged 3 million viewers a day, and the Olympics did 30 million,? he said. (Last year?s World Cup games averaged 3.2 million viewers a game on ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC; the Vancouver Games actually averaged 24.4 million on NBC in prime time, according to Nielsen.)
How flexible NBC?s live-or-taped approach will be, post-Ebersol, remains to be seen. His successor, Mark Lazarus, declined to. Comcast?s own media sophistication could prod it to produce a hybrid, with more live coverage but still plenty on tape.
Fox will enter its bid first Monday afternoon in a room at the Beau Rivage Hotel in Lausanne, followed by ESPN on Tuesday morning and NBC in the afternoon. Each will make a two-hour presentation in which it will extol its production and distribution. After NBC?s bid, the three media giants will attend a cocktail party with I.O.C. officials, then wait for a decision. All three can also bid for the 2018 and the ?20 Olympics.
The amount of money the I.O.C. squeezes from the winning network could be reduced by the effect of NBC?s loss for the Vancouver Games and the likelihood that it will lose at least that much in London. (NBC paid $820 million to carry Vancouver from an advantageous North American time zone; it lost more than 25 percent of its investment.) The size of the bids could also be affected by how Fox, NBC and ESPN value Sochi, the site of the 2014 Winter Games. It is a Black Sea resort in a volatile area of Russia that is nine hours in front of the Eastern time zone.
If the I.O.C. is dissatisfied, it could ask for more bids or adjourn until another time.
Neal Pilson, who was an I.O.C. consultant in 2003, said the strengths of ESPN and Fox as part of global companies could give them an edge over Comcast, a more conservative company with only domestic assets, especially if they are bidding for four Olympics.
ESPN, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, and Fox, a part of News Corporation, ?are much more comfortable taking risks based on projected economic growth and have a worldwide revenue base,? he said.
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