Page 123 - Sport Culture and the Media

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estimated global viewing audiences of 3.5 billion (Gordon and Sibson 1998: 209).
When, for example, de Moragas Spà et al. (1995: 207) sceptically examined the
claim of ‘3.5 billion people simultaneously watching the Barcelona Opening
Ceremony’ in 1992, they considered such factors as access to TV sets in develop-
ing countries, levels of interest in sport, viewing alternatives and time zone
variations. The authors concluded that, even based on an optimistic estimate of
a ‘potential world television audience [of] 2.3 billion . . . the highest possible
audience for a single event, such as the Opening Ceremony, must be estimated
to be between 700 million and one billion’ (p. 215). This is still a striking
statistic, but one that at worst is only one-fifth of the original estimate. The
International Olympic Committee (2002) estimated that the Sydney 2000
Olympic Games, broadcast in 220 countries, were ‘the most watched sports
event ever’, with over ‘3.7 billion people tuned in to watch . . . representing
a 20% increase over the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games four years before’.
Total viewer hours were estimated at 36.1 billion and ‘Nine out of every 10
individuals on the planet with access to television watched some part of the
Olympics’. Important for arguments above concerning access and cultural
citizenship was the claim that ‘90% of coverage broadcast on channels available
to the entire population of each country’. The economic significance of these
audience ratings is clearly reflected in the statement on the revenue generated by
the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, with the value of broadcast rights recorded at
US$1331 million, 45 per cent of total revenues of approximately US$3 billion.
These far exceeded any other source of income with, for example, tickets
to venues generating only US$551 million or 19 per cent of total revenue (IOC
2002).
Much of the attention that has been given to media sport, especially
when dramatic simultaneous world viewing statistics are circulated by the very
media who benefit from them, has involved analysing its relationship to the
wider process of globalization, of which it can be seen as both significant
expression and engine (Maguire 1999; Bairner 2001; Miller et al. 2001). While
the globalization of sport has been judged to be, in various ways, uneven,
inconsistent and subject to resistance and some market failure, it has been in the
context of continuing expansion of the media sport industry. Only recently,
therefore, has it been necessary to ponder the consequences of global recession.
There are several disastrous post-millennial stories around the world in which
the next great leap forward in media sport has resulted in a career-threatening
hamstring injury. One of the most spectacular examples of these is Germany’s
KirchMedia, who seemed to hit paydirt in 1996 when FIFA sold them the broad-
cast rights to the 2002 and 2006 World Cups. The Kirch group bought the rights
for a reported record 3.3 billion Swiss Francs (2.3 billion Euro; Bunn 1999: 5) as
part of a consortium with Swiss sports marketing group ISL. But the cost of the