It may be best to think of the fledgling Olympic Channel as a venture capital-backed tech startup, says Timo Lumme, the International Olympic Committee’s director of television and marketing services.
The comparison makes sense: The channel has a $600 million war chest, isn’t expected to make a profit for years and plans to go live without key sources of revenue identified.
“The business model is not that we’ll be hitting the pavement, hitting the streets to try and raise advertising revenue to cover the $600 million,” Lumme said. “The project is fully funded, there’s commitments from the various Olympic stakeholders.”
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IOC’s Timo Lumme: Linear isn’t a priority.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
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With only 10 months before its planned launch next April, several major questions remain surrounding the Olympic Channel, including the identity of its top operational executives, its digital distribution strategy and the source of its programming, aside from IOC-owned archives. Agreements with the world’s various media rights holders — including NBC Sports — and worldwide Olympic sponsors are still in the works.
Content deals will be crucial to the channel’s programming plans, with one idea on the table being content swaps, Lumme said. For instance, a network might turn over old Olympic features for use in other markets in exchange for new content created by the Olympic Channel.
The IOC hopes to convince Olympic stakeholders that a permanent digital video home will help all of them by boosting fan interest in between Olympics. The IOC’s 12 worldwide sponsors have all been briefed on the channel and how they might activate against it, but no advertising deals are done, Lumme said.
U.S. Olympic Committee Chairman Larry Probst pushed the IOC to focus on digital distribution during meetings at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, and the channel is following through.
Deals with cable networks to carry the Olympic Channel on linear television are not a priority, Lumme said. The IOC hasn’t engaged Comcast on the topic, he said, and most distribution efforts today are focused on building a broad portfolio of social media sites and video sites to distribute Olympic Channel content. “An [over-the-top] digital channel was the obvious answer, so that’s what we’re focusing on,” Lumme said. “If down the line there are options in whatever way they present themselves for perhaps local linear presence, we’ll be happy to look at that.”
The IOC also has published requests for proposals to build both the consumer-facing website to host the channel and for back-end components, such as the video streaming platform. Lumme added that they’re not sure how much of the site will be built in-house.
“We’ve scoped this accordingly to make sure we can launch and provide a product worthy of its name,” Lumme said. “How this evolves ultimately we’ll have to see.”
This much is clear: The turf battles that doomed the last attempt at an Olympics channel are settled. On May 31, IOC President Thomas Bach named Probst chair of a new commission overseeing the channel. Retired NBC Sports Group Chairman Dick Ebersol also joined the board of directors at Olympic Channel Services, the operating subsidiary that will run the channel.
In 2009, the IOC killed a joint effort by the USOC and Comcast to create an Olympics-focused cable network, prior to Comcast buying NBC.
