Korean-Language TV Wants Change in Rules for Access to Olympic Footage

With the Atlanta Olympic Games fading from memory and the 2000 Sydney Games four years away, many of us in minority communities in the United States hope that rules for televising the Games will be improved in the interim. Specifically, I refer to the inability of local foreign-language TV stations to access footage of non-American athletes during the recent Olympics.

NBC imposed strict rules during the Olympics that prevented us, KTE, a Korean-language programmer, from showing Korean athletes to Korean American viewers on our nightly broadcasts on Channel 18. KTE was allowed to show only two minutes of Olympic footage during its daily news broadcast, and only 24 hours after completion of a particular event. Compounding the problem, there were virtually no Korean athletes shown in the domestic footage provided by NBC. And NBC also prohibited rebroadcasting of footage shown overseas.

The International Olympic Committee should look into the way it handles broadcast rights for the Games. Even though the IOC sold the rights to one exclusive broadcaster, domestic ethnic programmers should be allowed to buy a partial right to the Games involving athletes from their homelands at reasonable prices depending upon the size of their communities.

Allowing ethnic viewers to watch athletes from their native lands would not take away the profits from an exclusive broadcaster like NBC. Perhaps, NBC could have charged minority language programmers for broadcast rights--possibly another income source for IOC, as well.

With present-day telecommunications making the world smaller every day, it is hard to understand why we could not watch the Olympic Games as they impacted on our own community.

YOUNG KUK CHANG

President

Korean Television Enterprises Ltd.