TORONTO – Rogers Media said Thursday that it will not take part in any bidding for the Canadian broadcast rights to the 2014 and 2016 Olympic Games as it is pulling out of Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium.
The decision will not affect the company’s plans to help show more than 5,000 hours of coverage of London 2012, in conjunction with CTV. Under the current consortium agreement, which spans the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games and 2012 London Summer Games, Rogers Media is a 20% stakeholder of the consortium while the remaining 80% interest is controlled by CTV.
The Olympic Games in 2014 and 2016 will be held in Sochi, Russia, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, respectively. Bids for the broadcast rights for those Games are thought to be due into the International Olympic Committee by early this winter. Rogers’ decision to walk away opens the door for CTV/Bell Media to go it alone, for Shaw Media to take a stab, for the CBC to return to Olympic coverage, or perhaps a new consortium will be built.
Rogers Media president Keith Pelley, who built the consortium as its president and lead it through the Vancouver Games, said it wasn’t an easy decision to exercise the contractual option Rogers held to pull out of the partnership. “For me personally, it was an emotional, difficult decision, but we have to look at it objectively, despite the fact I’m a huge Olympics supporter,” he said in an interview with Cartt.ca. Pelley is on the board of directors of Own the Podium, for example.
“As much as Rogers Media would like to continue being involved with the Olympic Movement, scheduling conflicts, combined with our financial priorities, suggest that it’s best for us not to be involved at this time,” he added. For example, the London Olympics will wreak havoc on Rogers Sportsnet’s Toronto Blue Jays and Rogers Cup Tennis coverage next summer. Sochi and Rio would have presented similar problems and include serious production costs.
“If you walked into Sportsnet right now, you would see on a wall every single (sports) property, whether we own the rights, whether we don’t or properties that are open, and you evaluate them on a number of different factors," Pelley continued. The company looks at scheduling, return on investment, whether it’s long or short form programming, can it become a staple on the schedule, does it develop the Rogers brand, what it does for distribution, and for the viewer.
“When we put all of these together, it was clear that it wasn’t a fit for us right now," he explained.
The CTV/Rogers broadcast consortium reportedly paid $153 million for the rights to Vancouver and London and then spent well over $100 million more to stage the Vancouver/Whistler production. While there has never been a separate public accounting of the Games broadcast profit or loss, the consortium did, in fact, lose millions, according to several sources.
While Pelley declined to pin Rogers’ decision on financial considerations or to comment further, it seems likely that the company did not want to lose more money on Olympics broadcasting that wrecks its regular schedule while most of the high profile events are emblazoned with another company’s brand.
– Greg O’Brien
