The new arrangements appear to have come as a surprise, and the BBC has some responsibility here.
But millions will spot the change, and they have already been making their displeasure known. BBC1 is by far the most popular way for audiences to enjoy the Olympics, and Adam Peaty’s gold medal and Tom Daley’s triumph were both available live to everyone in the UK.
It would be true to say that many viewers won’t notice much difference. This is required anyway by UK legislation for ‘crown jewel’ events but all the extra services and thousands of hours of content are now padlocked behind a paywall. But the BBC made the best of a bad outcome by negotiating a deal with Discovery so that they could retain the live coverage on terrestrial channels up to and including Paris 2024. The money involved should have been affordable if everyone had paid their share, even from budgets squeezed by governments. One participant at the time thinks their representative body, the European Broadcasting Union, let the deal slip through their fingers, and were ‘disjointed and complacent’. The public broadcasters were not guilt-free in this. In this case it was Discovery, with its sports brand Eurosport, which delivered a mighty blow to the PSBs across the continent by paying nearly a billion pounds to own a series of Olympic Games. Rather, it shows the way the sports world is heading: at best to a balance between free to air and pay content, or at worst to the international media giants knocking out the public service broadcasters. But for once this is not really the BBC’s fault. Now, in Tokyo, the BBC’s offering has shrunk back to a regular format of one live main channel service and one more via the red button and online – provoking a predictable cloudburst of criticism.
The research was unanimous: it allowed tens of millions of people to share every moment, and they loved the amount of choice they could exercise. ‘The Olympics are perfect for interactive television,’ said a BBC executive celebrating the innovation, ‘because there are so many events happening at the same time.’ In the run up to London 2012 we made the promise that UK viewers would be able to watch any event they chose, from beginning to end – and the corporation delivered 24 HD television channels and an equivalent number of online streams to achieve that. Not since Sydney in 2000 has all the Games content been squeezed into the main terrestrial channels, with the red button and its one extra stream making its debut in Athens 2004.
For viewers of the BBC Olympics coverage, it’s back to the old days.
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