10,500 athletes from over 200 countries took part in the last Olympic Games. London 2012 was the greatest sporting event ever held in the UK and the most watched in the history of broadcasting – more than 50 million people tuned in to the BBC’s TV coverage. 18 months later over 35 million people tuned in to the BBC’s coverage of the Sochi Winter Olympics. We’ll be doing it all again in just over 6 months’ time when the greatest show on earth rolls in to Rio de Janeiro, closely followed by PyeongChang in 2018 and Tokyo in 2020.
Earlier last year it was announced that Discovery Communications had acquired the UK media rights to the 2022 and 2024 Olympic Games. We were very disappointed to have lost out but that’s the nature of the sports rights marketplace, one that is getting more competitive and unpredictable as every day passes.
So I am delighted to announce that the BBC and Discovery Communications have today agreed a long-term Olympics partnership in the UK. The deal ensures that all the most popular moments from the Winter Games in 2022 and the Summer Games in 2024 will be available on the BBC to the widest possible audience.
The innovative deal involves the BBC sub-licensing (from Discovery) exclusive free-to-air TV rights to the 2022 and 2024 Olympic Games. The BBC has also acquired national radio rights to the 2022 and 2024 Olympic Games. In turn, Discovery will sub-license (from the BBC) exclusive pay-tv rights to the 2018 and 2020 Olympic Games.
The BBC will continue to be the home of the best action from the Olympic Games on a network TV channel complemented by a second live stream and a rich offering of digital rights to the content broadcast on these two outlets – allowing for a varied and in depth on-demand offer.
Covering an Olympic Games isn’t cheap and that requires a number of staff on-site to produce the quality of coverage that audiences expect from an Olympic broadcaster. So the BBC and Discovery have also agreed to explore the potential for combining our production operations with a view to better serving our audiences and sharing efficiencies from working together. We would be failing in our duty to licence fee payers if we didn’t forensically examine what was possible.
These are challenging times for the BBC given the significant financial savings that must be generated both in the short term and into the 2020s. We have already made some tough choices that have inevitably disappointed fans of the sports affected. But the BBC can no longer cover every sporting event as extensively as we would like to; the broadcast landscape has changed and we must adapt.
This ground-breaking partnership is another example of how the BBC is seeking creative ways to continue to bring the very best in sport to licence fee payers. Last weekend the BBC’s successful broadcast partnership with BT Sport continued with live coverage of the 4th round of the FA Cup and next weekend sees the start of the BBC’s new shared rights deal with ITV for the 6 Nations Championship. The Director General recently announced that he wants partnerships to be at the heart of the BBC’s future mission, working more closely with others for the good of the nation. That objective is as relevant to sport as it is to every other part of the BBC.
For quite a while the BBC’s future role in covering the Olympic Games was in question; a jewel in the crown that could have disappeared from the BBC’s airwaves for four years or possibly longer. Today, that cloud of uncertainty has lifted. Despite the scale of the competitive and financial challenges we face, the BBC’s long term commitment to sport could not be better demonstrated than through our holding of exclusive free-to-air rights to the next 5 Olympic Games.
Barbara Slater is Director, BBC Sport
- Read the press release - BBC and Discovery Communications sign long-term Olympic Games partnership