RIO DE JANEIRO -- The Olympic Channel, a digital platform created to keep the spirit of the Games alive year round and appeal to a younger demographic, debuts Sunday night after the Closing Ceremony of the Rio Olympics.
The site, at olympicchannel.com, is designed to be interactive and heavy on video, taking advantage of the International Olympic Committee’s archive. There also will be live-event coverage and a news operation.
The channel hopes to “maintain the feeling and atmosphere of the Games when the Games are over and the flame is out,” said Yiannis Exarchos, executive director of the Olympic Channel and CEO of the Olympic Broadcasting Service, which provides television feeds of the Games to rights holders throughout the world. He said the site is built for “a mobile experience.”
The plan is for some live events to be streamed, like Olympic qualifying tournaments. The site does not have rights yet to stream coverage during an Olympics.
“Live events during the Games will be dependent upon our partnership with the various Rights Holding Broadcasters of the Olympic Games around the world,” Mark Parkman, the site’s general manager, said by email from the headquarters in Madrid. “We have had discussions about the Olympic Channel being a secondary distribution platform. It will be case by case.”
The news operation, Exarchos said, will cover stories that show the IOC in a negative light, like the arrest last week of an Irish IOC member for allegedly scalping tickets.
“We will carry stories of failures,” he said, “people who fail on the performance level and the moral level. The limitations of human beings is part of the story to be told.”
Interest in the Olympics is high during an Olympics. But most of the sports attract little more than a shrug the rest of the year, at least in the United States. Clearly the Olympic Channel wants to develop a youngest audience to built loyalty to those sports. Exarchos mentioned the younger audience several times during a press briefing at the Rio Games.
Success, he said, will be “measured by a change in attitude of younger people toward sports. … It is an effort from the Olympic movement to bring the younger generation closer to the sport and closer to an active lifestyle. This is our chief objective.”
