Thursday, August 16, 2012

Sri Lankan Olympic Broadcasting - London 2012 an overview

As we have now come to the close of London 2012, we decided to take a look at how our local broadcasters fared in their broadcast of the games. In the run up to the games the legal battle between the Maharaja Organisation & Sri Lanka Rupavahini Corporation threatened to dampen the games experience in Sri Lanka with one trying to stop the other from broadcasting claiming exclusive rights.

After our post a couple of months ago on the run up to the games and our request to cancel the "exclusive" broadcast tag, the supreme court issued a historic decision allowing both the operators to broadcast the games and stopped the exclusivity of the games to one broadcaster. This undoubtedly resulted in Sri Lanka enjoying a much better coverage of the games than ever before. With pay television penetration at an all time high the pay television subscribers too had unparalleled coverage of the games from the FTA and pay channels.

One of the problems was the broadcasting of the same event by channels belonging to the different networks plus allocation of certain events to low coverage channels. But all in all this was the best Olympics for Sri Lanka in terms of games coverage. Now this begs the question of what will happen when the games move to Rio 2016 in four years time.

We urge the authorities concerned to scrap the "Exclusivity" of the broadcasts for good and allocate the rights for one more broadcaster and allow at least three or more broadcasters to telecast the games so that Rio 2016 will surpass London 2012 coverage. In addition there should be better co-ordination of the broadcasts between rival networks so that more than one channel don't up showing the same sporting event.

We commend Sri Lanka Rupavahini Corporation & Maharaja Broadcasting for doing an excellent job this year. However they should remember that they wouldn't have been able to handle the broadcasts alone. Looking forward to much better fare when it's time for Rio 2016.

Tuesday, August 07, 2012

Olympic Coverage Sri Lanka 2012

With over half the Olympics completed, it's very clear that this time the Olympic coverage in Sri Lanka has been excellent compared to the past. Mainly due to the pay television coverage & coverage by two Sri Lankan media giants.

The television viewers are feasting their eyes to coverage by pay television channels ESPN, ESPN HD & Star Sports including FTA coverage by Rupavahini, Channel Eye, NTV, MTV Sports, Sirasa TV & Shakthi TV. However it could still get better since we find that certain events are being telecasted simultaneously by two channels belonging to different networks. Olympic coverage on NTV cannot be viewed by a majority of viewers due to low coverage of the channel, the same applies to some of the Maharaja channels too such as mainly MTV Sports which has less coverage compared to Shakthi & Sirasa TV.

Kudo's going out the judges of the Supreme court for abolishing the exclusive rights granted to the state owned SLRC and allowing the Maharaja channels to carry out broadcasting the events too. The next time round there should be proper coordination between rival networks plus we believe a third network should be allowed to broadcast the Olympics too for a much superior Olympic experience.

All in all so far this year has been the best in terms of coverage compared to the previous years.

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