This reported by John Ourand and Tripp Mickle of Sports Business Daily that ESPN has sent its top production executives to Madrid, Spain to meet with the International Olympic Committee’s broadcast people. The meeting will take place tomorrow and included in the meeting is former ABC and CBS Executive Producer Mike Pearl who has helmed three Olympics for the two networks. Pearl is now ESPN’s Senior Vice President of Content and it gives the IOC a familiar face. This meeting focuses on the bid for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia and the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
One particular sentence of note in the SBD story is: “ESPN’s pitch centers around televising the Games in real time rather than on a delay.” Yes, ESPN would show the games live instead of a delay which has been NBC’s modus operandi since 1992. Now this meeting is just over production policies, not over the actual bidding and for how many Olympiads ESPN would be interested.
Fox and NBC have already been through similar meetings so this is nothing new. I did note on Twitter that none of ESPN’s top management executives were involved and John tweeted back to me the following:
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@fangsbites @TVvInce It’s a production meeting; not a rights fee negotiation. The top execs will be there to make the bid.
John Ourand
Ourand_SBJ
As mentioned previously, the IOC hopes to have a decision on the Olympics in July. The IOC may also consider packaging the 2018 and 2020 Olympics in this bid, but that has yet to be determined. As always, this is a story that Fang’s Bites is following closely. We’ll keep you posted.
