POSTED: January 14th 2010
NewsUpdate
NBC to roll out record Olympic coverage for Vancouver Games
LAURA WALDEN / Sports Features Communications
TAMPA, Jan 14: NBC Universal announced today that the US rights holding network will televise the most winter Olympics coverage ever with 835 hours of the Games across all platforms. The first all high definition winter Olympics will be viewed in America on NBC, USA, MSNBC, CNBC, Universal HD and NBCOlympics.com.
This edition marks more than the coverage of the last two editions Torino 2006 (419 hours) and US based Salt Lake 2002 (375.5 hours) for a combined (794.5 hours). The Vancouver time zone will also benefit US television times.
Chairman of NBC Universal Sports & Olympics Dick Ebersol said: “What’s unique about Vancouver is that more than any time in winter sports history, the United States over the last two years has emerged as the dominant international winter sports power. I remember the 1964 and 1968 Winter Olympics when the U.S. team won one gold medal in each. This U.S. team should have potential medal winners almost every single day of the Vancouver Olympics.”
The NBC network will focus on three segments daily afternoon, primetime and late night with prime time centering on men’s and women’s figure skating and alpine skiing. Other key sports will be freestyle skiing, speed skating, snowboarding, and short track.
NBCOlympics.com will provide over 400 hours of live events and more than 1,000 hours of on demand replays in high-definition quality. The mobile platform will feature up-to-the-minute results, breaking news, and video highlights of every event.
During the Beijing Olympics the NBC online coverage was hugely successful bringing in 52m unique visitors to the NBCOlympics.com website and generating 75m video streams. NBC Universal, now taken over by Comcast, has the TV broadcast rights in North America through London 2012.
NBC Universal stepped up heavily with commitments of $1.5bn for US media rights to the Torino 2006 and Beijing 2008 Games and $2.2bn for the Vancouver 2010 and London 2012 Olympics, throwing in a $200m GE sponsorship deal for the IOC.
The IOC has yet to tender the sale of rights for Sochi 2014 and Rio 2016.
Keywords · NBC · Vancouver 2010 · Dick Ebersol
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Laura Walden ()
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