To explore the application of media change in context, the chapters in this part examine in detail the case of the Olympic Games, which have always pioneered new media technology. Recent examples reveal interesting insights into what is coming next for Sport 2.0. In October 2009, the International Olympic Committee convened its 13th Olympic Congress, a showcase of current Olympic priorities and future direction. It took place within the IOC’s 121st session, at which the 2016 Olympic Summer Games were awarded to Rio de Janeiro, making Brazil the first South American nation to host the Games. One of the Congress’ main themes was “The Digital Revolution,” and the discussions brought into focus the IOC’s long historical—and financial—interest in media technology. It also generated debate about some of the issues that arise from developing such relationships. Two central issues were highlighted, and their resolution has paved the way for the next era of the Olympic movement’s relationship with media technology and culture.
The Olympic Games provide a particularly interesting case for studying digital change within the elite sports industries. Indeed, over the years, the IOC has been at the forefront of media negotiations and rights ownership, and the Olympic Games have always been a showcase for media innovation, and a community of elite media organizations in which they can experiment with new technology. During its 2009 Congress, the IOC asked two difficult questions about how the Olympic Movement would nurture its rich media culture. The first question concerned how the IOC would come to terms with seeing itself as a media organization, rather than as just an organization that relied on selling contracts for the exclusive use by media organizations. The second concerned the means by which this would be realized, which will require much greater engagement with current digital trends—notably social media, mobile broadcasting, and (broadly) Web presence. The IOC’s final report advanced a number of conclusions, which are helpful to outline in detail:
5: The Digital Revolution
… The Olympic Movement and its members must be fully cognisant of the impact of this development on all its activities. Future strategies and approaches must be planned in accordance with the massive new opportunities and changes brought about by the digital revolution.
59. A new strategy should be defined to enable the Olympic Movement to communicate more efficiently with its own membership and stakeholders as well as to allow for effective information dissemination, content diffusion and interactivity with the global population, in particular with the youth of the world. It should be an integrated strategy which includes the full coverage by all media and in all territories, of the Olympic Games, as well as the recognition of the new opportunities to communicate the fundamental principles and values of Olympism through all media.
60. The Olympic Movement must position itself to take full advantage of all opportunities offered by the digital revolution, information technology and new media so that the fundamental inherent values and objectives of the Olympic movement are reflected, while the rights of the IOC and the promotion of the Olympic Movement are protected.
61. In order to disseminate the values and vision of Olympism, the IOC and other stakeholders of the Olympic Movement should undertake a fundamental review of their communication strategies, taking into account the fast-moving developments in information technology and, more recently, the digital revolution.
62. The IOC and all other constituents of the Olympic Movement should explore all possibilities offered by the digital revolution; ensuring the broadest coverage of the Olympic Games, including the Youth Olympic Games, as well as of all other games and other major international sport competitions recognized by the IOC or to which the IOC has granted its patronage.
63. The IOC and all constituents of the Olympic Movement should give special attention to the opportunity provided by new technologies to gain increased penetration, exposure and greater accessibility worldwide.
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64. The establishment of a Digital Task Force including the IOC and other stakeholders is recommended; with a mandate to optimise the development and exploitation of digital technology.
65. The IOC and constituents of the Olympic Movement must recognize that despite the emergence of a new digital age, the widely varying rates of adoption of these technologies are at a different pace in different regions and among different populations. As part of its obligation to ensure the widest possible global reach, it is therefore important that this is addressed and that appropriate technologies are used to ensure that all have access to the Olympic Games and Olympism in a legitimate and equitable manner and that the issues presented by the digital divide are addressed.
66. The Olympic Movement should strengthen its partnership with the computer game industry in order to explore opportunities to encourage physical activity and the practice and understanding of sport among the diverse population of computer game users.
These conclusions arose in a period during which the IOC had already taken steps toward its immersion within this new digital world. For instance, in the same year, it appointed its first Head of Social Media, Alex Huot, who remains in this role at the present time. Since then, the IOC has launched the development of an Olympic Channel, which functions like a television channel but is mobile first and which delivers content about sports and the Olympics during the time between Games, as a matter of priority.
Nevertheless, perhaps the first question that arose from the IOC’s insights was this: If one accepts that the IOC has always been at the cutting edge of technology, then is it doing all it should do to ensure it maintains this position? There are two responses to this question, one is a superficial and one deep, but each is compelling. The superficial view draws attention to the manner in which the Olympics give rise to vast volumes of traffic on social media, an indication of the Olympic industry’s central position in the world of sports. The deeper view looks at a number of indicators—economic, cultural, political, and technological—that reveal how close the IOC is to the cutting edge of media change. The answer to this question may be discovered by examining how the IOC has positioned itself around media organizations and how it considers its role in the realm of direct public participation as a media producer. Indeed, these conclusions do not indicate how the IOC considers the Internet, as a means through which the Olympic values can be conveyed to more people. After all, the conclusions emphasize the desire to “communicate more effectively” and to “disseminate the values of Olympism.”
Throughout part III, I will broaden these aspirations and explore the Olympic industry’s relationship to digital change while also inviting questions about who should be recognized as the main producers of media content in a digital, social world. I will appeal to the idea that the IOC should look at the Internet as not only a means of communication but also a space through which its values can become critically evaluated and more meaningfully owned by the expanded Olympic family, including sports fans, amateur athletes, and people who are committed to the idea of sports’ changing the world for the better. In short, I will outline the idea of an open-source Olympics—an idea that articulates a third era for the Olympic movement and aims to embody the values of the Olympic Charter more effectively.
I begin by inquiring into the role of the Olympic media in establishing the Olympic movement as an affluent powerful force, partly through its relationship with the media. Next I consider how the Olympic media have changed in the digital era, both in terms of the culture of media production and journalism and in terms of the population and the methods of reporters who cover the Games. Next I examine the opening up of the IOC to contracts with new-media organizations, such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook. This encompasses a debate about how sports organizations can monetize user-generated content to create revenue for the IOC without jeopardizing its current financial base. More broadly, it considers how the rise of social media should provoke a shift in the administration of sport. Finally, I focus on how citizen journalism and guerilla-style media practices have transformed traditional definitions of ambush marketing. Overall, part III attends to the culture of media production that surrounds elite sports, focusing on the Olympic Games as an entry point to discussions about the importance of recent innovations and trends in how sports are adjusting to the digital era. In many respects, insights from this recent history of digital innovation at the Olympics provide the foundations for a world in which virtual-reality sports can become a reality.
In the past hundred years, the modern Olympic Games have stimulated technological innovation within media production. The intimate relationship between the Olympics and the media reveals how the Olympic values of excellence in athletic performance pervade the administrative culture of the world’s most watched event. The Olympic motto “citius, altius, fortius” has become a motif for the way in which the Olympic program tends toward transcendence. Every two years, the Olympic Games function as a showcase for their global sponsors and a test bed for their media partners’ experiments with the latest technology. This makes the Games an appealing vehicle through which companies can develop their brands with the unofficial Olympic value of innovation.
Through television, slow-motion replay, underwater film capture, mobile tracking devices, and other innovations, media technology has been tested in the context of the Olympics for many years. Three-dimensional and ultra-high definition television broadcasting were showcased at the 2012 London Games, drone cameras were featured at the 2014 Sochi Games and VR/360 film at the 2016 Rio Games. By studying these developments, one learns about the intimate relationship between sports organizations and their consumption via the media. Furthermore, their intertwined histories reveal how innovation is inextricable from the cultural shift toward digital mediation, which occurs alongside technological change.
Numerous events in modern Olympic history tell a story of media change. For example, scanners have been used to develop swimsuits designed to enable the wearer to swim faster and running shoes designed for an athlete’s unique foot shape. Such innovations also bring new aesthetic qualities to sports as athletes’ performances become increasingly shaped by the technology they use in competition. Equally, media change has altered how the Olympic movement undertakes its work and how it is financed. For instance, the 1980s saw a transformation in the IOC’s relationship with broadcast media which ensured that the sale of broadcast rights would also benefit the IOC rather than just the host city (Preuss 2006).
Today television broadcasting remains the dominant medium of the Olympic Games in both financial and cultural terms. Revenue generated from the sale of broadcast rights constitutes 74 percent of the IOC’s income (IOC 2016). To the extent that the Games are consumed principally by television audiences, scholars of media and sports have mostly focused on how television reports the Games. Though there are no precise figures on how many people view the Games, credible opinions range from around 2.4 billion to 4.7 billion. Official viewing figures from the 2008 Beijing Games indicate that 61,700 hours of television were broadcast and were seen by 4.3 billion people, reaching 220 territories (63 percent of the world’s population) (Sponsorship Intelligence 2008). The same source indicates that the most widely watched event of the Beijing Games was the opening ceremony, which reached 1.5 billion viewers. The 2012 London Games generated 99,972 hours of television and reached a global audience of 6.8 billion, and it was projected that 3.6 billion viewers saw at least a minute of television coverage (Sponsorship Intelligence 2012). However, the locations in which audiences consume the moving image are changing.
Since the year 2000, various factors have ensured that the Olympics are experienced online as well as on television. Since Beijing 2008, the sale of television and Internet broadcast rights has been organized under separate contracts. In principle this means that a national holder of television rights may not be the same organization as the holder of Internet rights. However, in the few cases in which this system has been in place, they have mostly been the same, as often the host broadcaster is also the organization best equipped to deliver a compelling online broadcast package. Indeed, the IOC is moving closer to a situation where television and digital rights are packaged together for a single rights holder. However, it is too early to tell whether this is the right direction for the Olympic movement. Separating rights may give rise to a new generation of online broadcasters, which operate in parallel with or instead of television broadcasters. An indication of this is Amazon’s recent acquisition of the gaming broadcast platform Twitch.tv, which has quickly become the preferred broadcaster for e-sports games, attracting live audiences of more than 8 million for single games. Even though the consequences of this shift are uncertain, changes are afoot as a result of the desire to broadcast exclusively online. For example, at the 2008 Beijing Games the IOC set up contracts to deliver content to 78 territories via YouTube, for which there was no other broadcaster (Xiong 2008), while in Europe the main Internet broadcaster was Eurovisionsports.tv, covering a further 72 territories. NBC remained the rights holder for the United States and deserves special mention for its significant contribution to the IOC’s revenues. For South America, Terra was the major provider, with 20 territories. TV New Zealand covered 14 territories (ibid.).
One of the questions facing the future of the Olympic media is whether the convergence of technological formats will lead to a collapse of the isolated televisual experience. Indeed, there is already evidence of this occurring, as smart televisions deliver a range of app-based experiences beyond the televisual channels, streaming content through broadband connections rather than television aerials. In the digital era, there is no meaningful distinction between Internet-ready media centers and stand-alone televisions, the latter of which can access a digital television signal or a broadband connection.
Television technology has already changed beyond recognition. They are no longer large, deep boxes with cathode-ray tubes inside, they now are more like computer monitors, thin, sleek, and digitally rendered. In the future, screens maybe simply dumb digital displays absent of any operating system, reliant simply on mirroring content pushed from some other mobile device. Although the content-delivery infrastructure matters more than the apparatus when one is assessing whether change is occurring, it is difficult to ignore how new habits emerge around new forms of content consumption, which can have a cumulative affect on a broadcaster’s audience share, if it fails to adjust to these changes. This may be especially apparent within the conversations around the IOC Olympic Channel, launched on August 21, 2016 at the close of the Rio Games. However, the shift toward mobile media may be the biggest change now occurring in how people engage with screen-based content. Moreover, an era of flexible screens wrapped around every imaginable surface is upon us, and this will ensure that media content is pushed out to every imaginable location and is tailored to each specific context and the people nearby.
This chapter explains the context for media change within the Olympic industry as a way of developing an understanding of how technological and cultural innovation have influenced the Games and how, in turn, the Games have transformed societies. It explains how journalists operate at the Games, the media structures that surround the Games, the rise of new media, how the Games may change the way that the media operate within a nation, and the pervasiveness of creative media products that are now constitutive of the delivery of the Olympic Games. And it reveals why looking after the media at the Games may be even important than looking after the athletes.
The Olympic media fall into two categories, news and entertainment, and the media contracts issued by the IOC shape the conditions in which sports journalism takes place at the Games, particularly for rights-holding television broadcasters. This does not mean that the contracts necessarily undermine editorial freedom or even journalist integrity, but in terms of the process by which stories are found and explained by journalists at the Games, the conditions of the Olympic media operations determine a large part of what kind of media coverage takes place. Journalists arrive in the host city pre-accredited by the IOC or the organizing committee and then find themselves working under extremely time pressure circumstances. They rely on being fed stories by the Olympic staging machinery of the organizing committee, most of which derives from the sports events.
This system was created by the media; the IOC didn’t impose it. This is important to understand when attempting to locate any critique in the appropriate place. Moreover, during each Games, the rights-holding media work with the IOC to improve their conditions for subsequent Games and the pressures on journalists have continued to grow, as have the demands made by them on the Olympic industry. Indeed, over the years sports federations have sometimes expressed concern that the media’s agenda has dictated what happens in the Olympic program all too much. Yet today’s media are under greater pressure than every before. The stakes are higher, and there is more history to capture than in previous times, but with reduced staffing. The proliferation of new digital platforms means that reporters have to serve as producers, presenters, writers, and editors in the course of their work. Television or print reporters may spend nearly all of their time in the Olympic city within a media center, or at a specific event venue, rarely roaming out into the host city looking for stories. Indeed, the idea that professional journalists should be able to undertake investigative work during the Games is nearly nonexistent and wholly reliant on whether an outlet has sufficient resources to cover these additional stories.
Successful management of the Olympic media is crucial to the success of the Games, but there may be different interpretations of what success looks like. In one version of the circumstances, the Olympic media infrastructure inherently restricts a journalist’s freedom to report, since their every movement is orchestrated from the moment they land to ensure that they fulfill a specific expectation to focus on reporting in a way that elevates the Olympic values, made apparent largely through the sports competitions. Moreover, the importance attributed to this aspect of the Games can be seen within all departments of the organizing committee.
From the IOC’s perspective and from the perspectives of the organizations that send reporters to cover the Games, everything else is subordinate to reporting the sports competitions—and any other news is considered an impediment to the core business of reporting the sports events. On this interpretation, there is no alarming conflict of interests among the media that are present at the Games. It is not that journalists are undermining their integrity when covering the Games. Indeed, those outlets that are able to dedicate human resources to cover the Games are not obligated to cover anything other than the sports, since this is the focus of assignments.
However, media organizations have more to do than report on sports competitions. After all, the Olympic Games give rise to a number of political, cultural, social, and economic discussions, all of which engage the world’s media and are in the public interest. In that sense, a sports media outlet is never simply a sports news outlet. Yet a news media outlet that fails to dedicate resources to other aspects of the Olympic program may be failing to live up to its role as a news organization. The ethical obligation to report what is in the broader public interest becomes secondary to the tacit agreement between the media and the IOC—or that is how it would seem on the basis of the content that is typically created around the Games. For this reason, there may be a need for the creation of an Olympic media watchdog that would assess the freedom of reporters at the Games by evaluating the range of outputs that their organizations generate.
However, there are reasons to be wary of concluding that the editorial freedom of the media is undermined by the Olympic media machine. First, such freedom is protected within the distinction between news and entertainment media. Within any large media organization there will elements of both news and entertainment, but in legal and financial terms their character, entitlements, and obligations are quite different. Indeed, the rules that affect the use of Olympic intellectual property are different for the news elements than for the entertainment elements. News journalists have certain freedoms to report that entertainment media do not have. If a non-rights-holding television broadcaster wants to use some Olympic footage in its evening news—that is, to cover the Games as a news item—it can assert editorial freedom, and the IOC then provides it with a limited amount of content for the purpose of news reporting. However, if a broadcast outlet wants to use content from the Games within a slot that is reserved for entertainment, then the rules that govern non-rights holders will come into force.
Nevertheless, there is reason to be cautious about concluding that all is as it should be in Olympic news reporting, in part because there is a disciplining effect upon the Olympic media, which the Games and the organizers enable and manage. So, while news and entertainment may be separately managed by any media outlet, the influence each has on the other is a crucial consideration. Indeed, the evidence of this disciplinary bias toward self-censorship is apparent when unexpected incidents happen during the Games (as they did at Munich in 1972 and at Atlanta in 1996). In such instances, the sharp contrast of the Olympic coverage with the incidents reveal the narrowness of the Olympic reporting lens. This was also apparent at the 2010 Vancouver Games, during which a Georgian luge athlete lost his life during a practice run. These moments of news reporting are, of course, significant in themselves, but they are even more so because of the narrow lens through which the media frames what is appropriate news during the Games. This contrast is such a break in expectation for audiences that they become moments of profound sadness and emotional outpouring. The same is true of important moments in Olympic history, such as when athletes from North and South Korea entered the Olympic stadium at the Sydney 2000 Opening Ceremony, with their two flag bearers holding the pole of a single Korean “unification flag.”
This second view of the Olympic media is more generous toward both the media organizations and the IOC. It does not presume that the Olympic industry seeks to control the media, even if it sometimes endeavors to close down certain lines of storytelling. Indeed, this happens in quite pragmatic ways. For example, on the February 20, 2014, during the 2014 Sochi Games, the IOC’s daily press briefing involved one reporter asking the IOC’s Communications Director whether the Ukrainian team had asked permission to wear black armbands during competition to acknowledge civilians who had lost their lives in violent clashes in Kiev some days earlier. To understand the significance of this question—and the answer that would follow, it is useful to know a little more about the context. Thus, if an official request had been made by the team or the NOC and the IOC had rejected it, that would have been a major Games-time story. However, the IOC’s response was that no official request had been made and the parties concerned were actively trying to find a suitable way to acknowledge the sentiment of the athletes. The implication—not expressed explicitly—was that wearing armbands in the context of a political conflict might have the effect of politicizing the otherwise neutral zone of the Olympic competition. In this case, it was clear that the IOC was interested in ensuring the appropriate message would be conveyed. Yet it was also apparent that the IOC knew that it would have been subject to criticism if it had been revealed that an official request had been denied by them. However, in responding to the inquiry, it is not reasonable to claim that the IOC controlled how reporters did their work, or that they sought to suppress any suggestion that an official request had been made. Indeed, the Games-time daily press briefing with the IOC and the Organizing Committee is a key site where this independence is played out.
Nevertheless, the Olympic mechanism gives rise to a system of self-censorship in media agenda setting. The media voluntarily—though as a result of financial and political relationships—locate themselves within a situation in which their capacity to report the Games in full is compromised either because they don’t have enough resources to tell other stories or because they have a pre-designed Games-time reporting agenda that focuses only on celebrating the Games while minimizing the use of resources. Crucial to this consideration is the fact that sports events work with captive audiences; it is reasonably cost-effective reporting, since the content is produced by the sports themselves, the schedule is known in advance and news can be easily planned.
While it is likely that each of these interpretations of the Olympic media holds some truth, the relevance of this inquiry becomes apparent when examining what gets reported by the accredited media and, by implication, acknowledging what is neglected. I will consider this later in the book by examining the content generated by citizen journalists at the Olympic Games.
A further distinction that is necessary to make when situating the Olympic media is between different forms of media that create Olympic content. For example, in the case of television, the Olympic Games leads to the creation of new commissions the purpose of which is to build audience engagement with the Games ahead of them taking place, which, in turn, aims to increase Games-time viewing figures. Thus, before the Games it is common for television channels to create content that draws on public interest in the social significance of the event, elevating its political and cultural importance. Admittedly, it is difficult to separate out what may be justified on the basis of public interest and what is designed to build loyalty to an Olympic broadcaster, since they are often one and the same. For instance, this programming sometimes takes the form of documentaries about an athlete’s journey toward Olympic competition. Alternatively, it can involve quite sophisticated pieces of investigative journalism. For example, during 2007 the UK’s Channel 4 produced a number of programs about China in which the Olympic Games were used a backdrop. Similarly, the BBC’s flagship investigative journalism program Panorama has produced several documentaries about Olympic corruption, notably around the period of the bid for the 2012 London Games, where they endeavored to expose corruption in the Olympic city bid process. These examples of how Olympic programming enters the public domain via the media do not always directly involve the IOC or even the Organizing Committee, but they cohere with the broader programmatic goals of the broadcaster, or the editorial priorities of a newspaper. Yet collectively all of these stories become part of the ongoing Olympic narrative, which is repeated every two years via the landmark of the Games themselves.
While drama and documentary tend to be the formats through which broadcasters build awareness and interest in the Olympic journey, comedy has also featured as a vehicle for driving interest in the Games. For example, the mockumentary television series The Games, produced by the ABC network in 1998, was particularly successful and was widely discussed as having broken new ground in Olympic programming history—and in comedy history too. It told the story of a fictional organizing committee for the 2000 Sydney Games in a satirical manner. It was so successful in Australia that its stars—as characters from the show—ended up participating in the Sydney Games’ closing ceremony. A decade later, a similar comedy produced by the BBC preceded the 2012 London Games. Titled Twenty Twelve and mirroring ABC’s comedy, it provoked a public clash over the intellectual property of the idea, since the ABC creative team wasn’t involved with Twenty Twelve in any way. In each case, there may be something particularly interesting about the role of comedy in generating public support for politically controversial initiatives, in some cultures (Plunkett 2011).
Although it is tempting to talk simply about the comedic merit of The Games and Twenty Twelve, their satirical style invites deeper analysis particularly since the Olympic Games are so publicly controversially. Arguably, the political role of satire in these cases serves to dissipate public concern, despite the aspiration of satire to draw attention to issues of serious political concern. For example, in one scene within The Games, a shortfall in sponsorship leads the organizing committee to consider approaching a tobacco company as a sponsor. This example refers back to a longer historical context where tobacco has been systematically removed from the sports sponsorship world, because of the negative health associations of smoking. As the story unfolds within the episode, it appears that all the tobacco company wants from the organizing committee in exchange for its money is for the employees to take up smoking and be seen publicly smoking their brand of cigarettes. The message here relates to the willingness of the sports industry to prostitute its values in pursuit of endless advertising revenue, a message that the sports world may still need to consider.
Similar examples are found in the BBC’s mockumentary about the 2012 London Games. For instance, one episode deals with the hyperbole that surrounds the use of social-media marketing as an audience engagement device. The organizing committee is planning a marketing campaign that exploits the public interest in the Olympic Games and the British Queen’s Jubilee anniversary, which are occurring in the same year. (This is the part of the story that is true.) The creative team come up with the catchy campaign title “Jubilympics,” a portmanteau of Jubilee and Olympics, which was a story line intent on drawing attention to the absurdity and superficiality of social marketing and the impossibility of brand crossover in the tightly controlled world of Olympic intellectual property. The storyline was an attempt to poke fun at the sometimes superficial staging of mega-events and the sometimes pretentious manner in which public interest is gauged and exploited.
In view of this wide range of media artefacts that surround an Olympic Games, defining who is a journalist, what rights journalists have, and how they are served and managed are important in determining which stories get told and who has control of the narrative. This is why it is necessary to scrutinize the notion of the journalist in the context of the Olympic Games and the processes by which citizens can be granted that status. Evidence from recent Games demonstrates how the journalist’s role is gradually being transformed by a public who want more from the Olympic media than just information about the sports competitions. Indeed, the concept of the journalist has changed in a digital era and, with it, what is required of the IOC and the host cities. This is the first crucial shift in the era of social media at the Olympic Games.
The official media structures at the Olympic Games are the result of a combination of operational and financial needs. Ever since the Games’ financial crisis of the 1970s and the restructuring of the Olympic Movement as a commercially viable enterprise in the 1980s, the IOC has treated the media as a crucial Games stakeholder and a key member of the “Olympic Family,” which includes international sport federations, the athletes, team officials, sponsors, and IOC guests. To secure full coverage of the extremely diverse and concentrated range of Olympic activity during the sixteen days of competition, the host city is required to provide members of the media with state-of-the-art working venues,1 a fully equipped Media Village providing meals and accommodation, transportation to all official Olympic venues coordinated with the times of competition, and an extensive network of information points with the latest updates on all sports events and competitor backgrounds.
To control the number of media organizations with access to such facilities, the IOC has set a strict accreditation process similar to that established for the rest of the Olympic Family (International Olympic Committee 2015a, Rule 52). For press writers and photographers—the professional sports spectators—the IOC has set a maximum of 5,800 places per Games since 2000; numbers are allocated per country, with priority given to the main media organizations, which are determined by respective National Olympic Committees. Broadcasting organizations, as the main funders of the Olympic Movement,2 are treated differently, since television is the medium that has allowed the Olympic movement’s finances to flourish. Thus, broadcasters are not only treated as accredited media, but also as Olympic rights holders with access to the core Olympic properties, such as the rings, for use in marketing materials. The IOC states that “rights are only sold to broadcasters who can guarantee the broadest coverage throughout their respective countries free of charge” (ibid.) and they are offered exclusively to one broadcaster per geographical area. This means that in any one country there is typically only one approved official broadcaster and no competing TV channels can offer moving images of official Olympic events, except for editorial purposes. Broadcast organizations are allocated a set number of accreditations according to the level of funding support. Today the total number is approximately 14,400 individual accreditations, including reporters, producers, and members of the technical staff.
There are two main media facilities at the Games—the Main Press Centre and the International Broadcasting Centre, which operate in slightly different ways. Access to the latter requires a higher level of security clearance, as it holds the strictly protected “moving-image” feed of all sport competitions, which are available exclusively to right holders. Nevertheless, both of these venues are typically connected physically and share two characteristics as the main official accredited media venues. The first is that access to each requires full accreditation (or guest passes, which can be organized by an accredited person) under strictly limited quotas. The second is that they focus on providing information only about official Olympic events, including the Torch Relay, the opening ceremony, the official sporting competitions taking place during the sixteen days of the Games, and the closing ceremony.
Holders of Olympic broadcast rights often have access to all Main Press Center facilities, while the press and photographic media cannot enter the International Broadcast Center. Non-rights-holding broadcasters may be entitled to apply for accreditation at the Main Press Center to access and distribute text-based information about official events, but, as in the case of the press, they cannot gain access to the International Broadcast Centre or any moving images. This stipulation also encompasses the distribution of such images in an online environment.
The Olympic Charter specifies the IOC’s commitment to protecting the media coverage of the Games, as well as outlining the technical regulations imposed on journalists for this purpose (International Olympic Committee 2015a, Rule 48). In particular, it identifies the objective of the IOC to maximize media coverage and for such coverage to “promote the principles and values of Olympism” (ibid., bye-law 1). In so doing, the IOC asserts its authority over the media’s governance at each Games, by orchestrating daily press briefings, for example. Moreover, the host city is bound by these requirements, as an integral part of its Host City Contract. By extension, the IOC also asserts its exclusive rights by stipulating that
Only those persons accredited as media may act as journalists, reporters or in any other media capacity. … Under no circumstances, throughout the duration of the Olympic Games, may any athlete, coach, official, press attaché or any other accredited participant act as a journalist or in any other media capacity. (International Olympic Committee 2015a, Article 48, By-Law 3)
Accompanying these provisions is a series of other measures that aim to control the circulation of images to Olympic audiences. Host governments, at the behest of the IOC, are compelled to institute novel legislation that will govern the protection of the Olympic properties. These unprecedented conditions often attract criticism for creating a situation in which prior human rights may be undermined. Indeed, the Canadian filmmaker Jason O’Hara created a citizen-led documentary about the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games, titled State of Exception, to describe precisely the range of consequences that arise by governments instituting such policy around the Games.
“State of exception” is the phrase used to describe what happens when the government changes the law in order to deliver on the nation’s commitment to delivering the Games and it is not without controversy or consequence. For example, for the 2012 London Games, the British Government instituted an “Olympic Bill” (House of Commons 2005). These stipulations reveal that the IOC asserts the Games as its legal intellectual property, shared temporarily with the host city and its stakeholders. This indicates a division in the direction of the Olympic narrative—between the IOC, which is setting the conditions of the stage, and the host city, which is facilitating its orchestration. These conditions have led to precise stipulations in the contracts, which protect against the infringement of that property. For example, Olympic Charter Rule 53 states the following:
… 2 No form of advertising or other publicity shall be allowed in and above the stadia, venues and other competition areas which are considered as part of the Olympic sites. … 3 No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas (International Olympic Committee 2015a, Olympic Charter, Rule 50, p. 93)
The effects of such guidelines also apply to persons who enter Olympic venues, including spectators, athletes, and officials. They are prohibited from doing or wearing anything that might act contrary to this Rule. These areas of IOC regulation continue to expand from one Games to the next. For instance, at recent Olympic Games, all billboard space within the city center and areas surrounding the Olympic venues has been offered to Olympic sponsors or else left empty to avoid “ambush marketing.” The consequences of this rule were most apparent at the 2004 Athens Games, during which many billboards around the city were left completely empty. In this sense, the entire city may be construed as an Olympic venue. Here we have, not the Disneyfication of everything, but the Olympification of the entire public sphere, a complete occupation, which itself invites resistance from disenfranchised local communities. Indeed, it is difficult to walk around an Olympic city during the Games and not have some Olympic sponsor message always within one’s line of sight.
These conditions are indicative of the manner in which Olympic media content is controlled across the entire Olympic program. From managing reporters to determining which images are shown around a city, there is a remarkable amount of control that takes place around the circulation of media content at the Olympic Games. But although this version of the story focuses on how the media are under the control of the Olympic industry, it is also important to recognize how the influence exerted by the Olympic industry can bring about media change for the better, even when this is hard to verify. Although media change is an integral part of Olympic history in technological and cultural terms, it also has political consequences.
Although debates about the Olympic media often focus on how they have changed our experience of the Games, the reverse is also sometimes true. The staging of an Olympic Games can bring about changes in how a nation’s media operates, or how the nation works with foreign journalists. It may also have a significant impact on how a broadcaster operates. For example, in advance of the 2012 London Games the BBC convened an extraordinary steering group consisting of heads of programs from across the organization. The role of this group was to ensure that various departments and key programs within the BBC would have a joint approach to creating Olympic content in the years leading up to the Games. The BBC also instituted a program of journalism apprenticeships focused around the Games, which was also a new initiative for the organization.
Sometimes the Olympic media’s impact on society can be felt at a relatively low level—for instance, in the way that the Olympic program may lead to new forms of collaboration within the media industries, as the OBS demonstrates. The OBS is a fascinating organization, worthy of further study to understand how the Olympic program creates a labor community whose work stretches well beyond simply covering the Games.
One distinct element of the Olympic media machine is that it creates a situation in which an unprecedented volume of journalists come to a city, most of whom are overseas reporters. Each of these reporters arrives with his or her own sense of journalistic ethics and working ethos, and yet they are all expected to fit in with the particular rules that govern journalism within the host nation during the Games. In some cases, the way in which the journalists work in an Olympic host nation may be significantly more liberal for visiting journalists than what they experience in their home country, or it may be considerably more restrictive. In each case, the coming together of journalists as the Games—along with the liaison that takes place on the approach—is an opportunity for promoting intercultural dialogue about the role of media in society. The potential of this network may yet to be realized fully, but sports events are among the few regular planned media events for which such continuity of organizing is possible and for which strategic thought about the role of the media in social change could be a core element of what the network does.
The Games is also a platform for analyzing where the media and politics interface and there have been some crucial Games where tension between these two sectors has brought with it interesting transformations in how a nation relates to the rest of the world. The most recent, prominent example of this is the Summer Games of Beijing 2008, where the political debate about media freedom and how the growth of new media in China would be managed was, in some sense, transformative. The coincidence of China’s first Games occurring at the time of a social-media revolution, set the stage for an enormous range of possible changes to China’s media policy. It also shined a light on global concerns about China’s governance over the media generally and the Internet specifically. This period also encompassed discussions about censorship surrounding the presence of Google in China, a debate that would return in the post-Olympic period in the context of Twitter and resurface again around the Nanjing 2015 Youth Olympic Games. Whereas before the Games, China (particularly Beijing) espoused open media policies for journalists, after the Games were over discussions about surveillance and restrictions again emerged.
Yet China’s online population was beginning to boom. The statistics on mobile and online access were staggering. In 2007 there were more than 480 million mobile phone users in China, 17 million of whom use their phones to access the Web. The number of Internet users in China reached 137 million, exceeding the number of users in the United States by February 2008. In Beijing alone, there were nearly 5 million Internet users—30.4 percent of the city’s population. The percentage of Internet users in the under-30 age group reached 72.1, and the number of bloggers in China reached 20.8 million (China Internet Network Information Center 2007; Weitao 2007). Thus, a large proportion of the population were able to access the Games in ways that differed from those offered by traditional broadcasting.
It is no easy task to locate the origin of the Olympic influence on China’s media policy, or to identify its end point, but one landmark was March 2007, when the IOC launched a tender for the sale of the Internet and mobile platform exhibition rights (new-media rights) to the 2008 Beijing Games for China’s mainland territory. This was the first time that the IOC separated the sale of television transmission rights from Internet and mobile broadcasting. However, while China endeavored to honor its commitment to the IOC by abiding by the rules of Olympic media coverage, some of its own domestic media management laws and regulations had not been upgraded to meet these commitments.
Effective February 2003, China’s State Administration of Radio Film and Television (SARFT) instituted the Administrative Measures regarding the Broadcasting of Audiovisual Programs through the Internet and other Information Networks in China, which stipulated that a broadcaster must first apply for a “license to broadcast audiovisual programs by network” before they can broadcast audiovisual programs online. However, many broadcasters’ Internet content providers, including Sina.com, Sohu.com, China Unicom, and QQ, did not have such a “license,” which meant that they would not be able to broadcast under this regulation. In a transcript from Sohu.com in the first quarter of 2007, the company indicated that it had no role in the delivery of such content:
Sohu is the exclusive Internet content provider sponsor for the Beijing 2008 official website, so we are the operator of Beijing2008.com or .cn, for that matter, and all content on that website is provided by Sohu. … The new media rights is a separate matter and that is closely tied into with the TV broadcasting rights, so yes, there was a tender but that is separate and distinct from the official website that we operate. So it is almost like TV broadcasting rights in the eyes of the IOC. The outcome of the tender will be known probably—if not during Q2, it will be early Q3. So it is separate and distinct. (Carol Yu, Co-President and Chief Financial Officer of Sohu, cited in Seeking Alpha 2007)
In this moment, China may have found itself in a situation in which a new, digital broadcaster, could enter the stage and become a significant player—alternative to television—in the Internet broadcaster world, perhaps exerting a disruptive influence on the media conditions within China. However, it was not to be. Moreover, for China the SARFT regulations indicated that there would be considerable barriers to a non-China-based company delivering such content. Indeed, it was likely that a number of China-based companies were going to struggle with the regulations. In any case, China-based bloggers would face unknown penalties for broadcasting material via the Internet, though this was likely to be of concern only in the context of moving sports images.
A further consideration that made Beijing’s Olympics particularly interesting in terms of media history was the development of digital broadcasting technologies. As Weber (2005) notes, China’s government strategy was founded on an interest in maintaining political control while enabling steady economic progress. The challenge for telecommunications had always been that “authorities desperately want to control the flow of news and opinion—especially dissent,” while “the government also wants an open, modern and efficient economy, including a state-of-the-art telecommunications and information infrastructure” (ibid., p. 792).
How were these aspirations affected by pervasive reporting in an era in which producer, publisher, and audience had become irreconcilably blurred? Weber provides one answer indirectly, offering explanations for how different cultural forms are treated. Thus, Weber explains that the media are typically treated as “nation-building” entities in which entertainment enables “consumer support.” Perhaps if “new media” publishing in the context of the Olympics is treated as a cultural industry it will not be seen as presenting any destabilizing potential at all, but this would be a naive view to take on the contribution of media artifacts to societal dynamics.
Another moment when the Olympic Games influenced China’s media policy occurred on December 1, 2006, when the government instituted a set of regulations granting foreign journalists more freedom to report on the country in the run-up to and during the Beijing Games than had previously been the case. According to China’s top publicity official, Cai Wu, “the Olympic Games provide us with a good opportunity to adjust the regulations,” though post-Olympics China does not really testify to this having changed very much. Indeed, the regulations came into being on January 1, 2007 and came to an end on October 17, 2008. Similar anxieties about the openness of China’s media were voiced again on the lead up to its next Olympic event, the 2014 Nanjing Youth Olympic Games. In that case, even a registered journalist working in the Main Press Centre at the Games might not have enjoyed open access to the Web, which was available only on certain specified intranets and only with certain platforms.
Despite the short life of the legislation surrounding the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, it is unreasonable to conclude that it had no impact on how China approaches digital connectivity and open communications today. Indeed, the international attention to the debate about domestic media freedom in China, which preceded the Games and which engaged Human Rights Watch and Reporters without Borders in campaigns concerning the treatment of journalists; in addition to the legislation, may have allowed certain reporting of this issue that otherwise would not have occurred.3 This alone may have influenced the perspective of a generation of people whose views about such freedoms were informed by such conversations. The 2008 Beijing Games was not the first instance of governments drawing up special legislation to cover the reporting of the Olympics, though in the context of China this was all the more important in view of its ascent within the global economic community. These factors mattered most in the context of the non-accredited media population at the Games—that is, those who came to China to cover what happened around the Games but whom may not have been official, professional journalists. These non-accredited media are the new population of reporters at the Games and will be the focus of the next chapter. For now, it is useful to note that this, again, was a moment of disappointment when considering the potential of the Games to bring about media change, since only foreign visitors who had an official journalist visa were given access to the Non-Accredited Media Center, a vast undertaking capable of hosting 11,000 registrants.
The media coverage of the 2008 Olympics could have helped to promote Beijing and China to the world, which is perhaps part of the reason why the Chinese government relaxed press restrictions ahead of and during the 2008 Games. The Games were seen as an opportunity for the Chinese government to implement public diplomacy through new-media coverage via the Olympics Games. Clearly, the Chinese government did not want to lose the chance for the world to know more about its economic successes, especially through the words of people from their own countries. Beijing’s hosting the 2008 Olympics offered a great opportunity for China’s new-media community. Yet nearly two Summer Games later, one is hard pressed to say that this brought long-term change for the better in China’s Internet policies. Nevertheless, a considerable amount of journalism about China—journalism that may not have occurred were it not for the new legislation that was brought about because of the Games—took place over the Olympic period (Smith 2008). Thus, although the impact might have been short-lived, the legacy of the content generated over that period may have been unprecedented, and the long-term importance of that should not be overlooked. For instance, China’s media prominence was up by 20 percent in 2008 over 2007 and by 51 percent over 2000, dropping by 82 percent when the Games were over (Anthony Edgar, personal communication). For better or worse, it is clear that the Games offer a unique opportunity to draw attention to a place, especially if there are domestic controversies.
As was mentioned earlier in the chapter, the occurrence of the Nanjing 2014 Youth Olympic Games created a moment to revisit some of these changes. It is a particularly interesting instance to examine, since, despite the absence of global media coverage at these Games, they are still overseen by the IOC, which is an organization that China continues to court. Indeed, the relatively new Youth Olympic Games have already become highly coveted. Arguably, cities rarely take actions that would jeopardize their relationship with the International Olympic Committee, since they are all always potentially Olympic sites. Indeed, Beijing made a bid successful for the 2022 Winter Games. On the approach to Nanjing, there were still indications that China would respond to the IOC’s request to open up access to digital communication channels. Indeed, I was involved in the conversations that surrounded this directly. As a mentor in the IOC’s Young Reporters program, I worked with the IOC’s Head of Media Operations, Anthony Edgar, to convey our Games-time needs, which included access to platforms we specified during the Games. Although these were not open across China, and thus the impact on China’s media policy is negligible, the conversation between China’s government and the IOC over these matters is another instance of how the Olympic industry generates conversations. The consequences of the conversations may be hard to specify, but they can be seen as a kind of quiet diplomacy. Certainly, until China adopts a more open media policy, one should be cautious about championing the Olympic Games as a catalyst for change. Yet even the Youth Olympic Games led to the generation of content of a kind that typically wouldn’t emerge from China, without any editorial restrictions from the IOC or the government. Such small interventions are, to an extent, historically important.
Another way in which media operations have changed at the Olympic Games is in the use of social media to produce journalism. A crucial feature of the change is the manner in which media organizations have recognized the need to take their content to social-media platforms, rather than to expect to draw audiences away from large social-media environments and to their own platforms. In the course of a decade of social media, broadcasters and print outlets have had to accept the fact that their own efforts to create compelling platforms through which they can access the largest audiences has always been secondary to the volume of potential audiences found within large social-media sites. Indeed, today, many experiences of content consumption from third-party providers simply stay within the news stream of a Facebook user’s account, without needing to click externally to some other website.
In this respect, it is crucial to note the changes that have happened in the first decade of social media. Initially, social media provided new spaces for audiences to come together in what had become a fragmented online world, and old media organizations could reach out through these environments, focusing their investment into online delivery. Yet the second era best describes these platforms as content generators themselves, increasingly monetizing their distribution space through advertising. The old media partners have become subject to a new economic infrastructure. Journalists, having come to rely on social-media platforms in order to reach large audiences, have been compelled to work out how best to make use of the content-generating interests of social media users.
It is now beyond question that, as a distinct social space, social-media platforms are able to generate news that becomes the subject of journalism. The Olympic Games again serve as a case in point. For example, when the “official Olympic protesters” (Malik 2012) also known as “Space Hijackers” created a Twitter account using the London 2012 logo as their avatar, their creative act became a subject of news debate, leading the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) to inform Twitter that it considered this an infringement of their intellectual property.4 This undertaking became a focal point for news attention and is a good example of how social media operate as a vehicle for creating new kinds of performative acts that are newsworthy. I will examine more examples of this later, but here want to briefly discuss how the process of doing journalism has changed as a result of social media. This argument first requires expanding the category of social media to encompass what might be described more broadly as data-driven journalism.
The capacity of social media to generate large volumes of data that can provide insights into the world around us has created new skill sets within journalism and new attempts to engage people with content. The rise of infographics as a form of journalistic storytelling is a case in point. Some beautiful examples of Olympics-related infographics based on data generated from various programs have been produced at recent Games. For instance, a New York Times animated infographic from 2012, depicting 100 years of 100-meter sprint Olympic finals, displays the winner’s position relative to Usain Bolt’s world record time and is an effective way of articulating the change within this discipline over the years, in a way that words might have failed to do quite so effectively. Alternatively, the New York Times’ time-lapse photographs of snowboarders at the 2014 Sochi Games create hybrid visual media, somewhere between image and movie; a veritable digital zoetrope which explains what happens in mid flight during a half-pipe event. Tampering with image through data is indicative of this shifting skill set made possible by data and new design technologies. Further examples of such trends are found in cinemagraphs, which use video material to create still photographic works, which have subtle moving elements. The viewer reads the final work as a still photograph, but elements of the image retain their moving components, to create a hybrid artifact. The work also takes the form of an infinite loop, whereby it is not possible to know when the movement begins or finishes. A range of great sporting examples can be found from one of the industry leaders in cinemagraph software, Flixels (https://flixel.com/cinemagraphs/sport/).The effect is similar to an animated gif in principle, but the combination of using video, freezing a frame and retaining one aspect of it as a moving image, combined with an infinite loop, warrants its being described as a new kind of artifact within our media history (See Lin 2014.)5
Today, journalists risk losing their professional edge if they fail to engage with social media and integrate it within their practice, but this is also redefining their contribution. Indeed, at the heart of social media is a pursuit of creative digital alternatives, an attempt from participants within this new economy to distinguish themselves from others—a desire which goes back to early digital years of creating avatars. Today, it is now widely understood that being a reporter—in sports or outside—requires being able to operate across platforms and across skill sets. Toney (2012, pp.118–119) writes:
If you were a journalist covering a leg of the Olympic torch relay in the buildup to the London 2012 Games, you might have needed more than a pen, paper and laptop. At any major event, the demands placed on journalists now have increased. You could be live tweeting off your smartphone and uploading pictures via Twitpic. You might need to be proficient in Audioboo to get short interview clips online or a live streaming website like Bambuser, while YouTube has turned everyone into a broadcaster competing for millions of eyeballs. A laptop and mobile phone with plenty of charge is vital when fi ling on the fly; indeed, back-up batteries are a must because there is no guarantee you will get close to a power source. If you do find a source, it will probably be taken, so make an extension lead part of your toolkit too.
Although there has been some debate as to whether social media make professional reporters unnecessary, evidence indicates that the rise of user-generated content is, instead, leading to a remaking of the reporter’s role. For example, Mare (2013, p. 95) outlines how the professional journalist becomes even more crucial to “verification, contextualisation and amplification” in a world of social-media news reporting. Furthermore, Mare notes that the consequence of social-media reporting is the development of a new form of collaborative journalism. Tracking research into the use of social media over time within sports journalism, Reed (2013, p. 558) notes that sportswriters began using Twitter for professional networking and then subsequently for “breaking news, promoting their work, and connecting to readers” and then as a newsgathering service.
On each of these levels, there are challenging implications for sports reporters, particularly since the nature of the live event and the desire for immediate news can undermine the processes by which verification and confirmation of circumstances is possible. Interviews with journalists conducting research at the 2014 Sochi Games revealed the challenges they faced. For instance, there is a need for reporters to verify what has happened before it is reported, whereas a member of the audience may feel no such obligation and may “break” the news item before the journalist has a chance to verify the occurrence. The implications of this are particularly important in unexpected situations. For example, at one event a British speed skater fell and had to retire from the event. At the point of falling, the attending journalists had to make a decision as to whether they tweet the occurrence, or whether they go down to rinkside and find out what had happened and the injury’s severity. Doing the latter might risk losing crucial time and not being the first to report the story, but waiting to know more would ensure accuracy of the report. Though there might be some value for the reporters in breaking the news, without details the significance of that news may be undermined. Arguably, sharing only the face value of the incident compromises a journalist’s ethical obligation to their audience, since he or she will effectively be telling half of a story—and that half might inspire a certain degree of unjustified panic in the audience. In this simple example cited above, one is alerted to a number of challenges for journalists who are working on reporting live events, where there are also audience members with similar means of communication through social media. Defining the roles of each eyewitness describes the core tension between the citizen and the professional journalist and resolving these differences may require a technological solution. For example, perhaps accredited journalists should be given access to a privileged audio feed that allows them to hear the conversation between the athlete and their team advisers, so they get exclusive, first hand access to what has taken place.6 Alternatively, perhaps the athlete’s body could be augmented with sensor technology that could provide live information about the severity of the injury, so that it is immediately apparent how important the incident is in the athletes’ overall career. This could allow the journalist access to the crucial information necessary to provide a near immediate story which extends the capacity of a witness’ account. Imagine the reporter sat in their booth and, the moment an injury happens, a screen switches to a close-up, live image feed of that athlete’s injured limb, providing medically precise diagnostics on what has happened. In that scenario, whereas the citizen might witness the event and tweet the incident the data available to the journalist would allow him to also say whether the incident is severe or minor. While elements of this proposition seem far removed from what is likely to be available any time soon within elite sports, the growth of wearable technology might soon make this possible. The only question is whether there is any value in maintaining a layer of exclusivity to the accredited media, or whether this should be immediately open to all. In a world where media exclusivity is crucial to the economic foundation of sports, this may be the way to bypass the potential compromises arising from the fact that audiences also have professional media tools available to them to tell stories. Yet access to information that the general public cannot obtain is, in one crucial sense, an organizing principle of journalism, which may explain part of the crisis it faces today, where everything is available to everyone at all times.
The examples cited above also highlight an area discussed by Sherwood and Nicholson (2012) as a tension in how sports journalists use social media—between the individual and the institution. Sherwood and Nicholson note that some journalists “would never break news on Twitter, because it wasn’t directly associated with their respective newspaper” (p. 950). Reed (2013, p. 568) also notes that frequency of social-media use may be correlated with professionalism: “Twitter allows them to gather news while keeping a disinterested stance toward the people they cover, while Facebook blurs this traditionally accepted tenet of professional and private boundaries.” There is also a sense in which the content of social media becomes part of news syndication directly, with reporters picking up first-person comments within their Twitter or Facebook accounts and republishing them within stories. Alternatively, Artwick (2013) discusses how professional journalism needs to adjust to social media, considering their role as a service rather than as a source of generating end products. Instead of creating stories for audiences, media outlets must think of themselves as tools, through which audiences can create their own stories.
All these transformations suggest that what it means to be an Olympic journalist is quickly changing as a result of new configurations of content syndication and as a result of the rise of a generation of media consumers whose desire for real-time pervasive news content seems insatiable. Though this may not compromise the key components of what journalism entails, it does suggest that additional competencies will have to be acquired in order for that content to remain relevant to an audience with increasingly diverse entry points to journalism content. This is likely to be a feature of the shifting character of journalism over the next decade.
A final consideration in the Olympic industry’s media operations is the development of two related organizations. The first is the Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), which has, since 2001, been operating as the official Olympic broadcaster, from which rights holders take their televisual content of the sports. The second is the Olympic Channel, a more recent project that emerges from the IOC’s Agenda 2020 and is a key consideration within the wider context of Olympic media operations for how it approaches the challenge of media change in present times.
The Olympic Channel launched at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, aiming especially to deliver video experiences for audiences between the Games, in an attempt to connect with a mobile-first younger generation. The creation of this new IOC platform may be seen as a step toward making sure it is well positioned to deliver a cutting-edge media experience at a time when platforms such as Netflix are transforming the habits of television audiences. Though the IOC has, historically, claimed that is not a content-generating organization, this may be about to change, though it must tread carefully, so as to not jeopardize the interest or good will of the rights-paying broadcasters.
Operated by the OBS, the Olympic Channel introduces new elements to spectatorship, drawing on some of the principles I have outlined around participatory spectatorship and data-driven audiences. For example, it integrates elements of gamification, linking live video content experiences to quiz information. It also integrates third-party applications to make the spectator experience more connected to the trend toward mobile health tracking. For example, a user can share Samsung health tracking data with the mobile app to see how his or her performance in a certain sport compares with that of an elite athlete. Along these lines, it is also possible for the user to select a sound track for his or her training based on the music preferences of their athletic hero. Finally, in a trend toward thinking of televisions as simply dumb screens, the mobile app is able to push video content straight to a television by means of a mirroring function.
Together, these elements of the new Olympic Channel proposition mark it out from what rights holders are doing with their Olympic broadcasts while ensuring that the IOC is placed at the heart of the new-media economy which is driven by the aggregated insights from participant and audience data. This single dimension of the Olympic Channel may be crucial to ensuring that it will flourish in the future. After all, the main aspiration of any media organization today is to become so important to its audiences that their behavior becomes habitually tied to the platform. If the IOC manages to gain the audience’s loyalty to its new channel, it may succeed in becoming the Facebook of the sports world, and all broadcasters may then commit even more resources to securing the Games.