POSTED: October 10th 2011
NewsUpdate
SPORTEL: How content has changed for the Olympics across mobile platforms
LAURA WALDEN in MONACO / Sports Features Communications
MONACO: Rights holders of the Olympic Games are having to dramatically work across a number of platforms to keep up with the ever changing world of high tech mobile technology these days.
The conference on “Olympic Games – The Lean Forward Revolution in Sports” today at SPORTELMonaco was highly thought provoking about the future of broadcasting the event.
As fans gravitate from the television to laptops, pcs, tablets and smart phones, no longer is televising the Games just the challenge of transmitting them on regular free to view network television. Now there are four extra platforms that rights holders have to deal with in order to just keep up with the times.
Today’s meeting was moderated by one man that is at the heart of the demand, Ciaran Quinn, who is in charge of the Deltatre company that produces this very specialized service for rights holders and organizing committees.
Quinn said, “We are going to talk today about leaning forward to new devices. The real question is it really important to look at four screens for a more connected experience. “
“Looking at some symmetrics, right before the Athens Games in 2004, the number of internet connected devices that were sold worldwide was approximately the same as the number of televisions sold worldwide.
“Then last year in Vancouver, the number of smart or internet connected devices was approximately double the number of TVs sold. And next year, from the forecasts that I am reading, the number will go four fold to TVs.”
“So what this means is that consumers have a lot more ways to connect to sport and will have even more in the future.”
Ellen Rian, executive editor for NRK, Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, talked about the importance of sports in Norway and especially winter sports as Norwegians are so strong. She noted that the country has 2 million households and 5 million people, and 92% of people have internet access and 80% use broadband. So the nation is very internet friendly and this is very important for how NRK plans its programming.
Mark Silver, from Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Consortium, noted, “During Vancouver 2010 we had about half of the Canadian internet population come to the website. Live video drove a lot of the consumption for us.”
“For London we are going to focus on what was best for Vancouver and use this format for 2012 and cut the rest.”
Ben Gallop, head of BBC Sport Interactive, spoke about the upcoming London Games as host broadcaster, “There is this enormous appetite in the UK for the Olympics and we are less than a year away. When the tickets went on sale a number of people missed out and this is where we step in as host broadcaster and get them as close to the action as possible.”
Stephane Kanah, founder of Echoes, noted that 2010’s will be the decade of the mobile. In 2011 85% of handsets will be able to access the web, in 2012 mobile users will top desktop users, 2013 the UK will have over £3.3 billion transactions in mobile payments, 2014 will have $6.5 billion of coupons redeemed in the USA, and 2015 will mark a growth in users from 500 million to 3.5 billion since 2010.
All these facts add up for a highly lucrative market for rights holders and further drives home the necessity to focus on multi-platform media access for high level events. The Olympic Games is one of the most watched events on the planet. It could be just a matter of time before the entirety is streamed online via multiple devices.
Keywords · SportelMonaco · Ciaran Quinn ·
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