Privatisation of Olympic Games - A lot more than Games at stake

IT may seem off-target to talk about the privatisation of the free-to-air broadcasting of the Olympic Games — still, despite everything, a magnificent international spectacle — at the very moment the great European project, and especially the unfortunate, vulnerable people of Greece, is facing its greatest challenge.

However, the two narratives have parallels that should not be ignored, parallels that seem to define one of the regressive trends of our time. They speak to what is one of the transformative forces of the age: The escalating concentration of media and financial resources and how the power that narrowing confers can change the lives of ordinary, ground-floor citizens right around the world.

How, instead of offering greater choice, it corners programming options and corrals pay-to-view audiences. Others it ignores.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has sold the broadcasting rights to the Games, winter and summer, from 2018 to 2024, to Discovery Communications, the parent company of Eurosport for €1.3bn. Last year, the IOC signed a $7.5bn deal in the US with NBC that runs until 2032. The deal, signed by the IOC president, Thomas Bach, without a bidding process, will support his plans for an IOC television channel between Games.

In a conversation involving such tremendous sums, national broadcasters like RTÉ or even the BBC can do little more than look on as excluded but interested bystanders and hope they might be able to come to an arrangement with Discovery Communications that will allow them broadcast an edition of the Games that best serves their domestic audiences.

It has yet to be established how effective a tool our 2009 Broadcast Act, which lists the summer Olympics as a designated major event which must be shown free-to-air in this territory, will prove in this multi-billion euro scenario.

Professional sport is a product, an entertainment just like a Taylor Swift concert, and it is unreasonable to expect to enjoy it without paying a fee but in cultures where it is used to attract an audience and advertisers to bolster public service broadcasting, it is much more. It generates the revenue that puts “service” in public service broadcasting.

If RTÉ, were it to lose the Olympics — or Premier League soccer, Six Nations rugby or, dare it be said, Gaelic games — it would be an entity emasculated by collapsing advertising revenues and unable to offer the kind of service that shines a light into the dark, sleazy corners that should be exposed in a progressive, transparent society.

The BBC depends on a different funding model but might, in similar circumstances, suffer a similar fate. And who benefits from this changed broadcasting landscape? Just as the people of Athens, Thessaloniki and Pátrai find themselves locked out of banks this morning, it seems inevitable, even in the Information Age, that whole swathes of societies will be locked out from the events that define, or at least defined, their culture.

This is neither a satisfying or empowering prospect and when considered in a wider news gathering and reporting context, it seems a challenge to the practices that underpin democracy.