The Globe and Mail reports that although war coverage will make a dent in the budget of the U.S. networks, it won’t stop them from bidding for broadcast rights for the 2010 and 2012 Olympic Games this summer, according to International Olympic Committee(IOC) member Dick Pound.
The newspaper reports that there is possibility the 2010 and 2012 Games will be in a North American time zone – Vancouver in 2010 or New York in 2012 – and the price of the Winter/Summer Games could reach $2 billion (U.S.).
The three big networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC could lose as much as $50 million (U.S.) on the first day of the war, and $30 million a day on average for the next four, according to industry estimates in the New York Post. But it still won’t deter them from reaching for the Olympic rings, said Pound.
He said, “if they were bidding for this year, there might be some effect, except that having blockbuster Olympic programming that could be sold at premium rates would be one way to top up the dwindling coffers”. Pound negotiated previous lucrative broadcast agreements.
“Since the rights will be for 2010, 2012, I think the effect (of war coverage) will be rather negligible and I doubt that negotiations will occur until the situation becomes more stable”, he said.
According to Sam Corea, a spokesman for Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympic bid, a Games organizing committee gets 49 per cent of the global broadcast rights fees from the IOC and it forms a major part of the budget.
Corea told the Globe and Mail, “in the planning documents the IOC gave to the 2010 bid cities, we were told that we could plan on receiving $400-million (U.S.) for our organizing committee budget for the 2010 Games, but that this figure was not guaranteed. In our bid book we discounted the $400-million to $348-million (U.S.) which is 39 per cent of our proposed $874-million operating budget.
“During our evaluation commission visit, the commission had suggested that we underestimated the broadcast revenue and that we may have been too conservative”.
