Spain ’92 / A Medal Year : Media : Broadcast Olympics Get More Players : More foreign stations and pay-per-view TV networks are entering the arena, while the price tag keeps growing.

The prospect of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and other U.S. professionals rolling up lopsided victories in Olympic basketball competition thrills those American fans who prefer their gold medals without undue suspense.

And while it may not thrill the lords of sport at the International Olympic Committee on aesthetic grounds, the presence of National Basketball Assn. players is nonetheless heartening for purely commercial reasons.

The record $401 million that NBC paid for U.S. television rights accounts for nearly two-thirds of total broadcast fees for the Barcelona Olympics, so the care and feeding of American fans and advertisers is a high priority.

But as the Olympics become simultaneously more expensive to produce and more attractive to advertisers in the rest of the world, foreign broadcasters--private commercial networks in particular--are expected to shoulder an increasingly heavy share of the financial load.

The increased global broadcasting competition, observers say, will change the way viewers worldwide see the Olympics. Such changes might include increased advertising during Olympic programs and a bigger role for pay-per-view and other kinds of limited-audience television. Ultimately, viewers may virtually be able to create their own Olympic program from a menu of events available to their homes.

And while the IOC insists that sports decisions are made for sports reasons, some think commercial pressures will increasingly influence which sports become Olympic events, how they are showcased and whether professionals may participate.

Critics of this money-driven evolution worry that viewers will end up paying to see events that they used to watch free.

The viewer-access issue has heated up in the United States this year because of NBC’s introduction of a pay-per-view component into its Olympic coverage.

But there has also been controversy in Europe, where aggressive private broadcasters have bought up the rights to soccer, tennis and other events that people were used to seeing on public TV.

With partner Cablevision Systems Corp., NBC will present 540 hours of live Olympic coverage from Barcelona over its three-channel “Triplecast” on pay-per-view cable TV.

Although NBC will also broadcast 160 hours of “free” coverage, the Triplecast will be the only way to see much of the action--particularly preliminary events or less popular sports such as field hockey.

Viewers shouldn’t fear such innovations, said Dick Pound, chief broadcast rights negotiator for the IOC.

The Barcelona Olympics will feature about 2,400 hours of competition. Most over-the-air networks will show 100 to 200 hours, he said, so “to have a cable overlay or a pay-per-view overlay seems to me to make sense.”

At $29.95 a day and up to $170 for multi-day packages, the Triplecast audience will be decidedly limited. NBC hopes for 2 million viewers, but most observers think the number will be much lower.

Competition from other networks pushed NBC to make its audacious $401-million bid (up from $302 million ABC paid in 1988), which in turn sparked its venture into pay-per-view as an additional revenue source.

Similar competition has broken out lately among broadcasters in Europe, where the TV scene had long been dominated by state-run networks mainly financed not by advertising but by license fees paid by owners of television sets.

Today, the European Broadcasting Union, a 42-year-old coalition of “free world” broadcasters in Europe and the southern Mediterranean, feels its decades-long hammerlock on European Olympic broadcasting rights starting to slip under pressure from upstart non-members such as Germany’s RTL Plus cable network.

“There’s evidence that these new outlets would like nothing more than some prestigious programming like the Olympics,” said Chip Campbell of International Sports and Event Strategies, a New York City-based marketing firm.

Britain was shocked last year when Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB satellite network, in partnership with the BBC, paid $500 million-plus to lock up the rights to British soccer league games for five years.

Although the BBC will carry major playoff games, the deal still sparked outrage because the small size of Murdoch’s network--around 3 million homes--means most Britons effectively may be blacked out from regular season games of the country’s most popular sport.

Non-EBU broadcasters thus far have failed to obtain Olympics TV rights, but they have pushed fees sharply higher.

The EBU paid $90 million for European rights to the Barcelona Olympics, a pittance considering that its 140 million households will be able to see many of the most popular events live in prime time.

With Atlanta an awkward five hours behind London, the 1996 Olympic Games are arguably a less valuable property. Yet the EBU has already sewn up the 1996 rights for $250 million.

The threat of losing the Games to private TV forced the EBU to sign, said IOC negotiator Pound.

By signing its deal early, the EBU may actually have gotten a bargain. Next January, the EBU is scheduled to admit the members of the former East Bloc broadcasting coalition, the OIRT, which will nearly double EBU viewership to around 260 million households.

Commercial TV barely exists in most of Eastern Europe, but there are exceptions.

“Hungary and Czechoslovakia are definitely moving to commercial TV,” said Jay Stuart, sports analyst for Kagan World Media in London.

Once mechanisms are in place for a wide range of advertisers to support Olympic programming all across Europe and the Mediterranean, the rights fees may vault upward even more dramatically.

And that, observers say, will eventually lead to U.S.-style innovations such as the Triplecast.

In Japan, by contrast, a pool of broadcasters led by NHK, the commercial-free public operation, bid collectively. The pool paid $62.5 million for rights to the Barcelona Olympics, a modest $10-million increase over the fee for the Seoul Olympics of 1988.

“There is really no negotiation” between the Japanese pool and the Olympic organizers, one international broadcasting expert said. “They (the Japanese) simply say, ‘Here’s how much we’ll pay.’ ”

With all the big broadcasters in the pool, there appears to be little prospect for the kind of competition that drives rights fees upward in the United States and, increasingly, in Europe.

Such behavior may frustrate some on the international scene, but from the Japanese perspective, cooperation eliminates wasteful internecine struggles.

TV Asahi, one of the private national networks, discovered the pitfalls of going it alone when it bought exclusive Japanese rights to the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. Then came the biggest Olympic boycott ever, as 61 nations--Japan included--kept their teams home in protest over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

“TV Asahi did not succeed,” said Kenichi Hayashi, a sports executive for the Tokyo-based network.

With Japanese athletes out of the running and jumping, he said, “there was not much excitement. TV Asahi lost money.”

After TV Asahi’s experience, the NHK-led pool was formed.

And it may not be until Japan comes up with the equivalent of the U.S. basketball “Dream Team” that networks there will be motivated to quit their comfortable broadcasting club and bid aggressively for exclusive rights.

CARRYING THE LOAD The fees that broadcasters pay for television rights to the Olympics have escalated sharply, but U.S. broadcasters still pay nearly two-thirds of the worldwide total. Major Networks

1984 1988 1992 NBC (U.S.A.) $225.0 $302.1 $401.0 EBU (Europe) 19.8 28.0 90.0 NHK (Japan) 19.0 52.0 62.5 Channel 7 (Australia) 10.6 7.0 33.75

Other Networks Summer Olympics Rights Fees (All figures in millions)

1984 1988 1992 CTV (Canada) 3.0 3.6 16.5 BOKP (Korea) 7.5 SABC (South Africa) 6.0 TVNZ (New Zealand) 0.975 1.5 5.9 OIRT (Eastern Europe) 2.5 3.0 4.0 OTI (South America) 2.2 2.5 3.5 ABU (Asia) 2.2 BOTP (Taiwan) 1.1 Telemundo (Puerto Rico) 0.5 ASBU (Arab countries) 0.5 Other* 4.5 2.4 TOTALS 287.575 402.1 634.95

* Arab countries, Korea, Taiwan, Asia grouped under “Other” prior to Barcelona. Sources: COOB (Barcelona Olympic Organizing Committee), Kagan Global Media.