Peacock Struts Off With 3 Olympics Nbc Pays $2.3 Billion For Rights To Games In 2004, 2006 And 2008

Once, the IOC said it could live without television. On Tuesday, it gladly took $2.3 billion from NBC for three Olympics yet to be given homes, jacking the network’s sports-rights bill up to nearly $4 billion in a little more than four months.

NBC acquired the exclusive U.S. broadcast rights to the 2004 (summer), 2006 (winter) and 2008 (summer) Olympics for that record sum. It’s the first time a network secured the rights to three Olympics at once, and the first time the rights have been sold to a games before the site has been decided.

The deal follows by four months the network’s purchase of the rights to the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney and the Winter Games two years later in Salt Lake City. Except for the 1998 Winter Games in Japan, which CBS will televise, NBC will have all the Olympics for the next 12 years.

Not exactly what Avery Brundage, then president of the International Olympic Committee, expected in 1956 at the Winter Olympics in Cortina, Italy. Brundage claimed, “We in the IOC have done well without TV for 60 years and will do so certainly for the next 60.”

Brundage’s skepticism seemed appropriate when the last torch-bearer at Cortina’s opening ceremony tripped and fell over a television cable.

Thirty-nine years later, Brundage would be shocked at how times have changed. Today, the Olympics are a multibillion-dollar industry and TV’s hottest property.

The latest deal ensures financial security into the next century for an Olympic movement that was on the verge of bankruptcy and collapse just 15 years ago.

“We see this agreement as a landmark in the confidence and trust it shows in the Olympic movement,” IOC marketing director Michael Payne said. “The Olympics has proven itself as the premier global event in attracting TV audiences.

“The Olympics are a property on their own, and wherever they take place they command higher TV ratings,” Payne said. “As long as the country is able to come forward with the appropriate infrastructure to stage the games, then for TV companies and sponsors it really makes no difference where the games are held.”

It’s been a long journey since the first Olympics telecast at the 1936 games in Berlin, when three cameras provided 138 hours of coverage for an audience of 162,000 people.

The tradition of TV rights fees began in 1948, when the BBC coughed up about $3,000 to show the London Olympics. Reports at the time said the BBC later pleaded poverty and the organizing committee never cashed the check.

The Olympics didn’t go truly global on TV until 1964 with the first satellite relay of the Tokyo games. TV rights fees reached $32 million for the 1976 Montreal Olympics, but that didn’t cover the cost of broadcasting the games.

The last two decades have seen a huge increase in television rights fees and audiences for the Olympics.

Next summer’s Atlanta Olympics have generated more than $900 million in global TV rights fees, including $456 million from NBC.