On September 26, 1979, ABC announced that it had won the rights to broadcast the 1984 Summer Olympics in the United States. The fee, which was triple what NBC had paid for the 1980 games, clocked in at an astounding $225 million, around $650 million in today’s dollars. While it seems ludicrous that broadcasters would be willing to pay such massive sums for merely the right to televise these quadrennial competitions, in truth the olympics are a huge draw for viewers, and they always have been.
Since their beginnings, the Olympics have been innovative in both film technologies and the business of broadcasting. The first film rights to the Olympics were sold for the 1924 Paris games to a French company, although these couldn’t have been for broadcast as Philo Farnsworth was yet to demonstrate the first working television. The 1928 and 1932 games first utilized slowed-down film footage to determine the victors of close races, a technique that has become integral to the operations of the games.
The 1936 games marked the first true broadcast of Olympic action, as well as one of the most notable films about the event. The German Post Office filmed and displayed dispatches from the action in 28 “television rooms”, essentially movie theaters, around Berlin. They recorded using a number of different cameras, including the Fernsehkanonen (“film cannon”), which was over 7 feet long and had a lens nearly 1 1/2 feet wide. Around 150,000 Berliners visited television rooms to watch the reels.
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| A German Film Cannon |
While the post office men were carting around their film cannons,
Leni Riefenstahl was making an entirely different kind of film. Dubbed Olympia, Riefenstahl’s film glorified the bodies and forms of athletes with beautifully shot imagery that helped set the scene for film as an art form. While Riefenstahl was a groundbreaking filmmaker, and Olympia was a milestone achievement in the history of film, she was also most certainly a Nazi, and when viewed in context with her body of work and the zeitgeist of 1930’s Berlin, Olympia was definitely an infomercial for the Nazi party.
Olympic broadcasts turned a corner at the 1968 games. ABC, who had paid $4.5 million for the rights to the U.S. broadcast, greatly expanded the amount of coverage typically seen for the Olympics. They aired 44 hours of Olympic programming, three times as much as had been done for the previous games, and introduced a winning format that focused not just on the events and results, but went in depth into athlete’s backstories. They found that this was enough to generate significant advertising revenue during the games, and also gave them a ratings boost for their regular programming after the events had concluded.
With ABC transforming the way we watch the games and demonstrating their value as way to boost viewership, broadcasters began to fight much harder to acquire the rights. For the 1976 games, the price for broadcast rights had shot to $25 million, and would skyrocket to nine times that for the 1984 games. NBC recently paid around $4.5 billion for the rights to the summer and winter games through 2020, averaging at around $1.1 billion per event. It is important to note that these figures are just what the networks pay to get their foot in the door; they are still on the hook for the cost of actually producing the event. They will spend additional hundreds of millions on personnel, equipment, travel, and various other assorted costs.
With prices spiraling so high, networks no longer expect to directly profit from broadcasting the games. Inflated advertising rates go a long way to cover their costs, but they plan on losing money. Showing the Olympics has become more of a point of pride, and a boon to their overall ratings rather than a direct money maker. It can be certain that as long as there are Olympic games, people will want to watch, and broadcasters will continue to find new ways of bringing the action to the masses.
