ESPN's coverage of the Olympics in the U.S. sans video rights — Poynter

Kelly McBride critiqued ESPN's coverage of the London 2012 Olympics for the Poynter Institute. ESPN did not have the rights to broadcast the Olympics. That meant its flagship newscast SportsCenter faced many challenges when reporting the games, especially not being able to show video of events until the day after they occurred.

Some pertinent lines describing NBC's control over Olympic video content used by other broadcasters:

"The rights to Olympic video are restricted, more so than almost any other sporting event. Of the hours and hours of amazing video every day, NBC released only the bare-bones highlights. Much of that video was for TV only. No amount of money can change this, said Mike Leber, ESPN senior coordinating producer for news coverage. NBC had the American rights to the Olympics and dictated what video was available to other broadcasters.

NBC also dictated when the video was available and for how long. Video wasn't available until 3 a.m. or later, when NBC's Olympics programming was off the air on the West Coast, and there were no digital highlights available for the Web."

La Liga television rights 2012-15

After a fall-out that threatened to delay the start of the 2012-13 season, an agreement on dividing domestic television rights for La Liga was announced on 17 August, just a day before the first round of matches.

Pay television rights are shared between Canal Plus (owned by Prisa S.A.) and Mediapro (Imagina) on the satellite and digital terrestrial platforms respectively. Mediapro also has rights to one free-to-air match per week.

The following is the agreement between the two broadcasters from 2012-13 through to the 2014-15 season:

Canal+ 1, Canal+ Liga (satellite pay TV)
Canal+ 1 will broadcast one exclusive match per week of its choice. An additional eight non-exclusive matches will be screened on Canal+ Liga.

Gol T (digital terrestrial pay TV)
Gol T will air eight matches per week including one game featuring Real Madrid or Barcelona. The eight matches will overlap with Canal+ Liga. Gol T will also broadcast one El Clásico per season.

LaSexta (free-to-air)
The free-to-air channel will broadcast one match per week, preferably on Mondays.

Watching the Olympics in Malaysia

The BBC's London 2012 Olympics trailer.

Above is a pretty sweet screencap of the BBC's 100% CGI Olympic Games trailer. It features London's most prominent landmarks including the London Bridge, the London Eye, Big Ben, 30 St Mary Axe, St Paul's Cathedral, and the recently completed Shard against the Olympic Stadium's lights mounted on its distinctive triangular towers. Not to forget the lush greenery in the foreground that represents rural Britain. The BBC is of course the UK's long-standing broadcaster of the Olympics, though its rights to future Games may be in doubt.

The main channels BBC1/BBC1 HD, BBC2, BBC3, and BBC HD will be dedicated to the event over all 17 days of competition. In addition, there will be 24 live HD channels accessible via TV providers Sky, Virgin and Freesat. For Freeview and BT Vision subscribers, there will only be one additional channel. The BBC Sport website will also stream 2,500 hours of coverage.

In Malaysia, sole TV provider Astro is not also the broadcaster of this year's Olympics, having aired the previous three. It probably decided to focus its resources on Euro 2012, seeing that Malaysians are far more interested in football. In 2008, Astro broadcasted both the Euros and the Olympics. However, the cost of television rights to sporting events have risen sharply over the last few years. That, along with Astro's direction of acquiring more football rights (including the Premier League since 2010 and the Champions League from 2012-13), could be the reasons Astro is sitting out this Olympics.