(eca004): For US broadcaster Olympic gold begins to fade (News Feature)

By Andy Goldberg Feb 11, 2010, 7:24 GMT

Los Angeles - It used to be the gold medal of US sports broadcasting. Now it hardly gets a bronze. With the winter Olympic Games set to open in neighbouring Vancouver, Canada, US network NBC, which has been broadcasting the Olympics since 1964, is bracing for one of its most challenging events ever.

The network, owned by industrial conglomerate General Electric, paid 2.2 billion dollars for the broadcast rights to the 2010 winter Olympics and the 2012 summer Games, but is expecting to make its first loss ever on an Olympics.

Part of the reason is linked to the sheer volume of coverage the network will provide over the games - a total of at least 853 hours on NBC and its sister stations - almost double what was shown in the 2006 Turin Games. But in normal times that would just mean increased opportunities for lucrative advertising.

These are no normal times however, and NBC sports supremo Dick Ebersol revealed on the eve of the games that the network expects to lose a cool 200 million dollars on its coverage.

'We will for the first time in all our years I've been with the Games lose money on the Olympics,' Ebersol told a meeting of industry executives last month.

It wasn't meant to be that way. NBC originally foresaw a tidy profit from its coverage which should have benefited from the fact that the Vancouver Olympics are almost home games for the US, which shares time zones, borders, language and culture with its northern neighbour.

Even the sporting gods aligned with NBC, blessing the US with a team filled with popular stars such as skier Lindsey Vonn, snowboarder Shaun White and speedskater Apolo Ohno, who have a chance of leading the US to its best gold medal haul in winter Games since the 1932 meet in Lake Placid.

Though ad sales have picked up recently after a turgid summer and autumn, they have failed to cover the costs associated with broadcasting the games in the digital age, especially since NBC paid 30 per cent more for the broadcast rights than it did for the Torino and Salt Lake City Games.

Adding to the trouble is the fact that the network is finding itself in a general slump and is leaking viewers to its rivals like Fox, CBS and ABC, as well as to the plethora of cable channels. Its bid to reinvigorate its nightly line up by shifting Jay Leno from late night to prime time turned into a debacle last month when the company moved Leno back to his old slot.

Nevertheless an estimated 185 million people will tune in over the 17 day period, and they will get coverage that is predicted by media critic Kevin Downey to be 'the most visually stunning Olympics in history.'

Many viewers, will catch the games for the first time in high-definition, thanks to the rapid spread of HD TV sets in recent years. Most of the popular events will be covered in prime time, and NBC is making sure that the most closely-watched contest in figure skating, alpine skiing and snowboarding will be shown on the days their rivals show their most popular shows, like Fox's American Idol.

Many fans of both events say they will sit on the fence and decide what to watch at the last minute. 'I usually never miss American Idol,' said Los Angeles-based hospital administrator Linda Kaufmann. 'But the Olympics are once every four years, so I don't know what I'm going to do. I guess I will just decide on the day.