The International Olympic Committee (IOC) wants to make the Olympic Games more attractive for young people through The Olympic Channel.
The new TV channel which will offer Olympic sports 24 hours per day as an OTT service from 2016 would be necessary “to retain the relevance of our sports and to root the athletes in the young target group,” IOC president Thomas Bach told German media magazine Horizont.
The Olympic Channel which is currently being built up in Madrid with around 120 employees will show a mixture of live sports, stories about athletes and volunteers, news and background information, Bach revealed.
Following the launch of the global channel in English language, collaborations with domestic TV channels in the local language would be possible, he said.
The IOC used to focus too much on traditional television, explained Bach. To reach young people, an extensive presence on digital platforms would be necessary. This would have been a key reason for the allocation of the European TV rights for the Olympic Games between 2018 and 2014 to Eurosport’s parent company Discovery.
“The multitude of platforms we will require in future can be offered by Discovery to us, but not by ARD and ZDF,” said Bach, citing the two German public broadcasters as an example. A reason for this would be legal restrictions faced by the public broadcasters.
