Prof Andrew C. Billings
University of Alabama (USA) is the Ronald Reagan Chair of Broadcasting and Executive Director of the Alabama Program in Sports Communication. He is the author of Olympic Media: Inside the Biggest Show on Television (Routledge, 2008) and the co-author of Olympic Television: Broadcasting the Biggest Show on Earth (Routledge, 2018).
Twitter: @andrewcbillings
Section 2: Media Coverage & Representation
- Twitter conversations on Indian female athletes in Tokyo
- ”Unity in Diversity” – The varying media representations of female Olympic athletes
- The Olympic Channel: insights on its distinctive role in Tokyo 2020
- Between sexualization and de-sexualization: the representation of female athletes in Tokyo 2020
- Reshaping the Olympics media coverage through innovation
- An Olympic utopia: separating politics and sport. Primary notes after analyzing the opening ceremony media coverage of mainstream Spanish sport newspapers
- What place is this? Tokyo’s made-for-television Olympics
- The paradox of the parade of nations: A South Korean network’s coverage of the opening ceremony at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics
- Tokyo 2021: the TV Olympics
- Why we need to see the “ugly” in women’s sports
- “The gender-equal games” vs “The IOC is failing black women”: narratives of progress and failure of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics
- Ghana: Poor local organizing, and absence of football team dampens interest
- Megan Rapinoe: The scary Bear for many Americans?
- ‘A Games like no other’: The demise of FTA live Olympic sport?
- Temporality of emotionalizing athletes
- Fandom and digital media during the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games: A Brazilian perspective using @TimeBrasil Twitter data
- Media wins medal for coverage of athletes as people, instead of entertainers
- Media frames and the ‘humanity’ of athletes
- Reporting at a distance. Stricter working conditions and demands on sports journalists during the Olympics
- New Olympic sports: the mediatization of action sports through the Olympic Games 2020 Tokyo
- Simone Biles, journalistic authority, and the ideology of sports news
- Representations of gender in the live broadcast of the Tokyo Olympics
- Americans on ideological left more engaged in Summer Olympics
- Nigeria: Olympic Games a mystery for rural dwellers in Lagos
- National hierarchy in Israeli Olympic discourses
- Equestrian sports in media through hundred Olympic years. A roundtrip from focus to shade and back again?
- Reshaping the superhuman to the super ordinary: The Tokyo Paralympics in Australian broadcasting media
- Is the Paralympic Games a second-class event?
- The fleeting nature of an Olympic meme: Virality and IOC TV rights
- Tokyo 2020: A look through the screen of Brazilian television
- Is the Paralympic Games a second-class event?
- How digital content creators are shaping meanings about world class para-athletes
- How digital content creators are shaping meanings about world class para-athletes
- The male and female sports journalists divide on the Twittersphere during Tokyo 2020
- Super heroes among us: A brief discussion of using the superhero genre to promote Paralympic Games and athletes
- “Everything seemed very complicated”: Journalist experiences of covering the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games
- Representing high performance: Brazilian sports journalists and mass communication professionals discuss their philosophies on producing progressive Paralympic coverage
- Representations of gender in media coverage of the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games
Desiderius Erasmus once opined: “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” If ever there were the embodiment of a one-eyed man in modern media, the Olympic broadcast would be it. The 2021 NBC broadcast of Tokyo 2020 was lamented as a major disappointment and, by any other recent benchmark, that sentiment could be corroborated, as ratings plunged 52.4% from the Rio 2016 Games. Still, the ratings more than tripled the next highest-rated program offered during the time period, and NBC often outperformed the next eight highest-rated channels combined. The Opening Ceremonies drew virtually the same ratings as Oprah’s televised chat with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, yet the ratings for the Olympics (17 million) “sucked so bad” while the ratings for the Harry and Meghan interview (17.1 million) were hailed as a “staggering…cultural earthquake.” Ratings dipped slightly (to 15.5 million) for the entire Games, yet it’s useful to note that these encompassed over 60 hours of primetime; Harry and Meghan’s interview? Just one.
Many reasons pervaded for why such a drop in ratings could be justified, including the lingering pandemic, troubling time zones, and the general fragmentation of modern television via streaming options. However, such ratings signal larger realities as media continues to transform. Some of the realities are more specific to the U.S., but others harken at global changes. Those include:
The uses and gratifications problem. Unlike a Netflix, HBO Max, or Apple+ program that is released and then can be consumed in any manner at any time on any device (as long as you’re a subscriber), megasporting events function differently. Most sports fans want to watch a contest as it unfolds live, but also wish for it to be offered at an ideal time–preferably right after dinner. This proves to be an impossible prospect in most cases where events occur outside one’s home continent, particularly for a global event like the Olympics.
Live sports is still the magic bullet for the streaming wars. When FOX debuted as a network in the 1980s, it had many buzzworthy programs (including, but not limited to, “The Simpsons”). But what led to the emergence of nationwide FOX affiliates was the securing of NFL broadcast rights in 1993. The same is likely to happen in the streaming world. Plentiful reasons exist for this, but think of it this way: when Amazon starts streaming Thursday Night Football games exclusively in 2022, it will not only add value to its Prime subscription, but will also reap the advertising benefits. For scripted programming, the majority of viewers now skip commercials or have a streaming service that deletes them from the start. Live sports? That percentage of skipped commercials drops to the low single digits.
The HBO model is the future. Since its inception and for decades, HBO has been built on an advertiser-free model, which largely equates to a ratings-free model. Sure, HBO would like you to regularly consume their content as it cements their role as a central part of a viewer’s media diet. However, all they really needed was one program that people couldn’t live without. Over the years, that might have been The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Real Time with Bill Maher, or Game of Thrones. As long as you’re THAT interested in a show that you’re willing to spend the $15 per month for HBO’s product, the company is set. Transition to the sports world and you see a streaming opportunity in the form of a magic bullet: a decent share of sports fans consider key games to be the must-see programming. Thus, streaming companies can take advantage of this while building their scripted content libraries; after all, if the key game is only available on a single streaming service, many will pay the fee only for that game, even if they have little interest in anything else the service offers. The same is certainly true for hard-core Olympic fans, of which they are legion.
And that leaves us at an intriguing crossroads post-Tokyo. The Olympics remain the biggest show on television, even if half the size they originally were. Paris will present a more North American-friendly time zone in 2024 while (hopefully) filling the stands in a post-pandemic context. The re-emergence of Olympic media narratives will resume, even if the real game is no longer about evening ratings. Ratings still matter, but they represent the battle. Streaming represents the war.
