Page 94 - Sport Culture and the Media

MONEY, MYTH AND THE BIG MATCH || 75

twenty-first century) more records have been broken more frequently in buying
sports rights than in performing in sport. Taking the example of the USA’s
NBC television network, it transpires that in 1995 NBC won the US TV rights
to the Sydney 2000 Olympics for US$715 million, as part of a deal in which it
paid escalating fees of US$793 million and US$894 million for the 2004 and
2008 Olympics, respectively, to show the Games to American audiences in
(then) unknown locations (which turned out to be, respectively, Athens and
Beijing). Despite its capacity to sell subsidiary rights, charge vastly inflated
advertising rates during key events, and make some other returns from various
‘spin offs’ (selling videos of Olympic highlights, for example), the cost of rights
and of producing TV coverage ensured that NBC would lose large sums of
money on the deal. But this does not mean that the NBC Board has suddenly
become philanthropic, and is prepared to carry out a selfless task of public
service by subsidizing the delivery of Olympics TV to the people of the United
States of America and the rest of the world. It has a broader economic motive:
the huge audiences for the Olympics raise the network’s overall ratings,
meaning that it is in a stronger position to negotiate advertising rights across its
year-round, all-genre programming. The network also hopes for an Olympics
‘spillover effect’ – that viewers will be exposed to and stay with its other
programmes or, even better, that it will ‘get the habit’ of switching on
NBC first. Being the Olympics station brings with it a great deal of kudos,
especially prima facie evidence (which might in practice be repudiated) that
the network can handle with distinction one of the world’s largest media events.
In an image-saturated age where ‘branded sign-value’ is paramount, being
known as the Olympic network – with all the brand recognition and prestige
that the label entails – gives an important competitive advantage in the
media industry. Securing the US broadcast rights to the Olympics also has a
‘spoiler effect’ – ambitious commercial rivals, such as Rupert Murdoch’s
Fox Network, can be thwarted (McKay and Rowe 1997) and induced to
expend equally large sums of money on other broadcast rights on pain of being
locked out of major TV sport altogether. They might also gain psychological
ascendancy over other networks like CBS boasting a strong sporting culture
who have lost out in the fight for key TV sport properties. All these justifica-
tions for paying out vast sums on broadcast rights for sport hold as long as it
can be demonstrated that, by one means or another, over time benefits outweigh
costs. As briefly noted above, and discussed in greater detail below, the ortho-
doxy that TV sport is more golden goose than dead duck has come under sharp
challenge.
Historically, there is great symbolic and economic value to be gained from
controlling the production and distribution of symbols and, in the case of
Olympic sport, global images do not come any more desirable (Schaffer and