Pending approval, they will then be officially introduced at the Closing Ceremony of the Olympic Games Rio 2016 on 21 August. “With its excellent track record in broadcasting, we believe that it will provide fantastic coverage across the region of each edition of the Olympic Games, including free-to-air television coverage. beIN SPORTS has also committed to providing unprecedented promotion of Olympic sports all year round, including significant support for the Olympic Channel in the future”, IOC President Thomas Bach said.
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“This is thanks to savings, considerable savings, which have been made with regard to the budget of the Organizing Committee”.
Bach’s comments seemed to be at odds with a pledge this week of additional financing from Rio’s mayor, and come amid a cash crunch for the committee staging the event.
The IOC, for its part, works with broadcast partners to “make a huge amount of coverage freely available across media platforms… and this is the key deterrent against piracy – fans prefer to watch high-quality, official Olympic coverage”, Seeley said. The news of the appointment was announced at the National House of Hungary in Rio de Janeiro.
“These Games did not take place in a bubble”. The group said the participation of more than 50 nations was in doubt because a travel stipend of $8 million to participating nations had been delayed by more than a month. “Broadcast rights agreements are therefore the single greatest source of revenue for the Olympic Movement and have been essential in the growth of the global popularity of the Olympic Games and the worldwide promotion of the Olympic values”. “Since becoming aware of the full scale of the problem, we have focused all of our efforts on finding solutions to the problems”.
Rio has spent billions on new stadiums and transport infrastructure to prepare for the first South American Olympics, with a final bill expected to be about $15 billion.
“The budget of the Organising Committee is privately financed; there is no public funding for this”.
An ongoing political crisis with suspended President Dilma Rousseff facing an impeachment trial and interim President Michel Temer being deeply unpopular, only added to the Games’ problems.
This meant the country missed out on its first gold medal when Fehaid Aldeehani won the men’s double trap.
“Imagine if this situation [of Rio being neglected] would have continued like this”, Bach said. The 25-year-old continues to divide opinion in the athletics world because of her condition of hyperandrogenism, which causes elevated testosterone levels that some rivals say give her an unfair advantage.
But if the 1,300-odd pirate streams on Periscope are any indication, the level of Olympics piracy is hardly a blip compared with the size of the audiences in the USA alone that NBC has tallied across TV and digital-streaming outlets over the course of the Rio Games so far.
Spending on the event hasn’t pleased everyone, and pre-games polls showed most Brazilians were opposed to staging the Olympics.
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