RIO2016 – Hungarians have to stay up all night because of the Americans

MNO.hu reports the latest news about the Olympic broadcasts: the American NBC is paying an insanely lot of money for the broadcast rights, therefore, the programme schedule rather depends on the American market. Which means that the people of Europe, including Hungary, have to carry out some changes in their lifestyles in order to be able to watch the events of the 2016 Olympic Games live.

As usual, people, especially the great fans of sports go quite crazy about the Olympic Games, understandably, of course. Sometimes they have to get up really early or stay up all night to root for their fellow patriots. This time, it seems that the favour is on the night owls, for several Hungarian-related sports’ events and finals will be broadcasted before daybreak in Hungary.

Furthermore, the broadcasting programmes are overwhelmingly scheduled according to the routines and needs of the certain continent’s people, but for a while now the competitions’ schedule is decided by the program schedule of the NBC. You may wonder why and how come that one channel can have such a huge impact, well, it is because huge crowds of people are moved by sporting events in the USA, populated by nearly 320 million.

They get really excited and interested, and follow the events both live and in front of the telly; for instance, when Hungary’s water polo team played against the Americans back at the 2008 Olympics, an unprecedented number of people in America watched the water polo match, meaning a great advertisement for this field of sports.

Plus, the NBC impressively paid an amount of 7.75 billion USD broadcasting fee to the International Olympic Committee. Such an amount of money could never have been paid by European public television, hence the Americans have been having the major say in the schedule, right until 2032, according to the contract. Also, the Rio Olympics will be the tenth Games in the USA that is broadcasted by the NBC since 1964.

Moreover, ever since the Seoul Olympic Games in 1988 their right to the broadcast is uninterrupted, and previously the London Olympics of 2012 meant a great milestone: 219 million people followed the events through NBC. The channel, thus, broke the record: the London Olympic Games became the most watched world competition ever, followed by the Beijing Summer Olympics. The site, therefore, suggests that the channel is pretty much going to compete with itself.

Unlike at the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014, this time the IOC came to terms with the European Broadcasting Union, and agreed with the public TVs through them. Here, in Hungary, the MTVA made an exclusive agreement on the broadcasting of the Olympics: they paid 2 million EUR to the IOC, meaning that Hungarians will have the opportunity to watch the events on channels M4 and M5 only. A crew of 54 people will be working in each location, though, there will be not studio built in Rio.