They Can Dish It Out and They Can Tape It

Don’t want to be spoon-fed the NBC production of the Sydney Olympics? Mad as hell that the Games will be shown entirely on tape delay? Don’t care for teary-eyed capsules of American athletes who have overcome some tragic episode for their moment in the Australian sun?

Sorry. Because, even with the advent of the Internet and the emergence of broadband technologies, your options are very limited.

Unless you’ve got one of those enormous satellite dishes--the really big kind that picks up feeds from all over the world, in particular the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. production of the Games, which will air live--you’re essentially at NBC’s mercy.

NBC and the International Olympic Committee have carefully, very carefully, set it up this way--hardly a surprise since NBC paid the IOC $705 million for the rights to the Sydney Games, the first of five installments on a $3.5-billion contract giving NBC the U.S. TV rights to the Games through 2008.

Though the Internet’s beauty is that it bridges time zones and it makes it eminently possible to provide live video and audio over the Web, it will very likely be of little to no value in watching action as it happens 18 hours away in Australia. The technology is there. But the lawyers have blunted it.

Short of moving to Detroit or some other outpost near the Canadian border, the best option for seeing the Games live, it turns out, is via a platform that’s about 20 years old--the big dish. Not the little 18-inch one that fits on your front porch. The really, really big ones you see on farms, at sports bars and, in some cases, dwarfing swing sets in suburban backyards.

“It’s nice to see it when it’s happening and to feel that excitement,” said Los Angeles lawyer Jim Bendat, who has a big dish planted in his yard.

“I put on the CBC to get the live action,” said Tom Whitenack, owner of the Station, a bar in Arcadia with a big dish.

“We have the technology. We can do it. Why not bring it to people live?” asked Joel Darling, executive producer of CBC’s Olympic coverage.

How can it be--living in 2000, in a society that can deliver stock quotes on a cellular phone--that the big dish and the Canadian feed are the best option?

Like most things involving the Olympics, it’s all about money.

The Olympic movement, which only 20 years ago was in financial straits, is projected to generate at least $3.6 billion in revenues over the four-year period from 1997-2000. Just over half of that is in TV rights fees from the Sydney Games and the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan.

Most of the TV money comes from the sale of rights for Sydney, a total of $1.331 billion.

At $705 million, NBC has put up 53% of the rights fees from the Sydney Games. It is far and away the IOC’s leading financial backer.

Of course, for $705 million NBC bought the right to put on the Games as it sees fit. Given the time difference--18 hours to L.A., 15 hours to New York--NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol opted to show the Games entirely on tape delay.

That enables NBC to show the Games in prime time. “I don’t have to apologize for this: My No. 1 job is to deliver the largest possible audience,” Ebersol said.

Research commissioned by NBC--performed by Statistical Research Inc. in Westfield, N.J.--shows that three-quarters of people who intend to watch the Sydney Games say the tape delay will have no impact on their enjoyment of the Games.

More to the point, NBC originally had envisioned losing money or perhaps breaking even on the Sydney Games. On Thursday, the network announced it had maxed out its ad sales--at $900 million--and will turn a profit on the broadcast. The Games open Friday and end Oct. 1.

That NBC sold out its advertising speaks “to the power of the Olympic Games and NBC’s unique ability to tell the stories behind the competition,” NBC’s president of sales, Keith Turner, declared in a statement.

What makes the NBC broadcast so valuable is, in a word, exclusivity.

And on this issue, NBC is zealous.

“It is obviously of considerable importance to us that our exclusive rights to the [Sydney Games] be respected,” an NBC official said in concluding a four-page, single-spaced letter that went out recently to TV stations and cable outlets across the United States and that spells out the rules for using NBC footage.

The first rule: With a few limited exceptions, no one other than NBC may broadcast “Olympic material,” as footage from events and the opening and closing ceremonies is called, “within the United States.”

The exceptions largely involve newscasts--to be precise, no more than three newscasts per day, and no more than two minutes total in any single newscast. Another rule dictates that there must be three hours between newscasts showing Olympic footage.

The rules are slightly different for an all-news (or all-sports) network, which is allowed to show footage more often so long as the combined air time--including repeat telecasts--does not exceed six minutes per day.

In any case, excerpts taped from NBC--or its cable outlets, CNBC and MSNBC--may not be used until after NBC has finished its prime-time telecast. In the Eastern and Pacific time zones, that’s midnight; it’s 11 p.m. in the Central and Mountain regions.

The kicker is that it can then be used only during the following 24-hour period--subject to the rules about how many newscasts and total minutes on-air.

Meantime, NBC’s Rule 11 goes on to declare: “Under no circumstances may audio or video excerpts of Olympic material be used on the Internet or any other interactive media.”

Why? NBC bought rights to the Olympic broadcast “within the United States.” By definition, the Internet knows no such territorial boundaries.

Therefore no one, regardless of where they are in the world, may legally put onto the Internet a live shot from the Games--because that same shot, even if launched onto the Net from Lagos, Nigeria, can be picked up just fine in Los Angeles.

Which is not to say that Internet pirates won’t try to bootleg a signal--or that some enterprising soul with an inexpensive Web camera and Internet access won’t send an original broadcast around the world.

“If someone has the capacity for major distribution, it’s a copyright violation and we will find some way to close it down,” said Dick Pound, an IOC vice president from Canada and the man who negotiated the NBC deal.

Though television is clearly king, the IOC--even NBC--plan to use the Sydney Games to experiment with the Internet’s capabilities.

In one pilot program approved by the IOC, Phoenix-based Axient Communications will deliver 10 minutes of Olympic video coverage from the previous day’s NBC feed to high-speed Internet users who subscribe to specially licensed U.S. Internet service providers.

The NBC Web site, www.nbcolympics.com, will post results as they happen--it just won’t show them. It is jampacked with other material, including athlete biographies and sports analysis.

Other sites, such as Yahoo’s, also plan to offer instant results as well as coverage in a dozen languages besides English.

America Online plans to offer its subscribers the choice of seeing scores and results in real time or on delay--meaning only those events that have aired on NBC. A nonscientific survey conducted in July by one of its subsidiaries, AOL asserted, showed that 75% of those who plan to seek Olympic information online did not want to know event results before broadcast on TV.

The IOC’s marketing department projects that official Olympic Web sites, including www.olympics.com, will attract more than 35 million individual users during the Games. That’s up from 2.5 million in Nagano two years ago.

Intrigued by the possibilities, the IOC also plans to hold an Internet summit in December, where the focus will be “how sport and new media industries can find partnerships to maximize opportunities,” meaning make money.

For now, however, the reality is that 35 million individual users translates to less than 1% of the projected global TV audience for the Games, 3.9 billion people.

Which is why TV still rules. And why the vast majority of Americans will watch the Games, taped, on NBC. Including its two cable arms, it plans to broadcast 441 1/2 hours from Sydney; 162 1/2 of that will be on NBC itself.

By contrast, CBC plans to broadcast 288 hours. All of it live.

In a recently issued CBC newsletter, producer Darling says he’s not worried that many events from Sydney will be on in the middle of the night in Canada.

“There is a solid core of viewers who will get up to watch events like the 100-meter final and the swimming events,” he says. For sleepy viewers, he says, the CBC plans to offer “a full recap each morning,” beginning at 9 Eastern time.

NBC’s Ebersol dismisses such plans: “Less than 10% of the population will see events live. And who in September doesn’t have school or work at 9 a.m.? So who will better serve the viewers?”

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For complete coverage of the Sydney Olympics, including audio commentary from Times columnist Bill Plaschke, photo galleries and up-to-the-minute stories and results, go to https://www.latimes.com/olympics.