Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), the media and entertainment heavyweight, will be one of the primary broadcasters of the upcoming Paris 2024 Olympics and Paralympics.
The company, through a major deal with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) struck back in 2015 (as Discovery), holds essentially pan-European rights to the games, on an all-encompassing basis.
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WBD will provide coverage via its linear, digital, and mobile platforms, across 47 countries (in 19 languages) on the continent, and aims to showcase every minute of every event across the two weeks between July 26 and August 11.
In total, 3,800 hours of Paris 2024 action will be shown, meaning a peak of 54 streams up and running simultaneously, with all 329 medal events to be covered live.
For linear coverage, the pan-European Eurosport broadcaster is available across over 130 million homes on the continent, while the streaming element will incorporate Max, HBO Max, and Discovery+.
In terms of production, this will be based at WBD House in Paris, on top of the Hotel Raphael, where a crew of 190 will be in place daily, with this location to feature four studios and 23 cameras in total.
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By GlobalDataDedicated and specific productions will be available in 11 of those 47 European markets – the UK, Sweden, Poland, Italy, Finland, Norway, Spain, France, Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands.
The Olympics will be, without doubt, the most significant sporting event covered by WBD since Discovery and WarnerMedia officially closed their merger in April 2022.
In advance of the sporting bonanza's opening ceremony today, Sportcal (GlobalData Sport) gets the thoughts of Scott Young, WBD Sports Europe’s group senior vice president for content, production, and business operations.
Young, who has been in his current role since December, explains the particular challenges and opportunities that this Olympic return to Europe brings, what innovations and technical ideas will be brought to these games, and how the different mediums through which the action is set to be covered will all co-exist.
He starts by assessing the mood inside WBD on the eve of what is essentially a home Olympics for Eurosport (headquartered in Paris): “The games are finally on our doorstep after years of planning, which really kicked off during Tokyo [in 2021]. It seems we’ve gone through all of that time very quickly, we feel very much fit and ready to go for what will be an extraordinary sporting and cultural event, and a moment in time.
“The Olympics is so much more than just a sporting event, people really celebrate the games because they’re a true gathering of the global community…
In terms of moving back to Europe for the first time in 12 years, Young says: “It’s a great occasion to have the games in Europe, in our backyard, in our timezone. We feel like there’s something really special about these games …
“The last time they were in Europe was London 2012, so everyone’s looking forward to having the summer games in a timezone that is consumable from start to finish for our European audience.
“The last three games were held in a timezone which meant the games took place very early in the morning for European sports fans. If you were a committed Olympic fan, you were up at 2am or 3am.”
By contrast, WBD – via Eurosport and its streaming platforms – will be able to start each day during the Paris edition with a breakfast show, which he describes as “a remarkable opportunity for us to lean into.”
Another change from Tokyo 2020 – and, indeed, from Beijing 2022 – will be the (relative) lack of strict protocols concerning Covid-19.
Young sums up: “The last two Olympics were very challenging due to conditions around Covid – from an athletes, broadcasters, and fans perspective. To have these Olympics in a European summer which is (hopefully) Covid-free is also providing a remarkable opportunity for us to collect with the athletes and their competition.”
He points out that a broadcaster’s main role at an Olympics, outside the live events, should be to tell the athletes’ stories – something which is made extremely difficult “when we can’t connect with the people involved … So, now that we’re out of the Covid period, we’re excited about finally being able to do that.”
Indeed, WBD will look to bring athletes into its Paris base following competition hours – in addition to being interviewed at the event venues, they will also attempt to “do something much more immersive,” as Young says, “and have them be a part of our general programming once they’ve completed their competition.”
He explains that the broadcaster has “spent a lot of time planning the relationships with those National Olympic Committees, so that we can have the athletes coming to our host set and sharing their stories.
“Our focus on the athletes started with a year to go, when we started creating content on the road to Paris."
WBD, across all its streaming and linear platforms, will attempt to broadcast close to 4,000 hours of live content, with every moment of every event to be made live across the streaming options.
Young describes this as “obviously a great opportunity, but also something we’re marking as a challenge – that we’ve set ourselves.
“The remarkable opportunity and challenge is the sheer scale of how much of the Olympics we want to bring to sports fans.”
Eurosport being branded as the home of the Olympics is how WBD plans to “start creating the story of these games,” while Max or Discovery+ will then “act as the streaming platform carrying that content – both the linear channels and then the individual sports streams from start to finish.”
In terms of the aforementioned major European markets for WBD, they will look at the various events taking place each day and identify the sports most relevant to their specific audience, with the most relevant experts and pundits.
As Young puts it: “There are both high-level and more in-depth local-level options available to our viewers.
“So from a WBD Sports pan-European perspective, almost everything will be available on our streaming platform; from a localized perspective, we’ll surface the sports that matter with the storytellers closest to them.”
He adds: “The unique nature of our broadcast platform is we’re not ‘one market one language’ – so we start by working out how we cater to our broadcast offering, which encompasses 47 markets, and 19 languages.
“That provides a level of complexity few other sports broadcasters will ever have to deal with.”
In terms of innovation and new technology that WBD will bring to its coverage of Paris 2024, Young believes “the technology that allows us to broadcast across Europe, to broadcast live across multiple markets and give them the option of all sports with local-language commentary – that’s brilliant from our team and is, I believe, the most innovative thing anyone will see across sports broadcasting during these games.”
Other specific innovations available through Max and Discovery+ include timeline markers across events from the games' most popular sports, pop-up alerts for when a gold medal is being contested, personalized watch lists, and the ability for users to bring up an in-player rail of all events taking place simultaneously.
However, he also says there will be no place on WBD’s Olympics coverage for Artificial Intelligence (AI), with that technology having recently started to appear in sports broadcasts for the first time.
As Young puts it: “While several broadcasters, including ourselves, are looking at what role AI plays in sports broadcasting, for these games it’s probably a little bit too early for any particular role, others will do some testing. Live sport matters and AI is yet to get to a point where it can bring to life the emotion of what live sport delivers.
“Because it’s not there yet, whatever role it might end up playing, it won’t be at these games.”
WBD having major physical infrastructure established in Paris means that one space can host multiple studios, which in turn means guests such as athletes can appear across different studios (covering the Olympics for each of WBD’s main European markets) in a short space of time.
Young refers to this major on-the-ground presence when the subject of remote production comes up, an option which he says requires the broadcaster “to assess the location and assess what you get out of being onsite,” as opposed to being back at home.
Referring to their approach for these games, he says: “While we do have a lot of people based in Paris and around France, we’ve also got a lot back at home base. We haven’t decamped everyone and sent them to Paris, that would have been an unwise move in how we show sport.
“What we have done, because of the unique nature of the venue – with the city itself being an Olympic venue and the opening ceremony being down the [river] Seine – is made sure we can truly bring that to life by having a number of people onsite.
“For Paris 2024, it’s vital to have the key storytellers as close to the action as possible, but they’re all connected to their graphic departments at different locations across Europe.”
Young concludes, looking ahead to the Olympics that will bring to a close the current deal between the IOC and WBD – although a new tie-up is set to run through 2032 in Brisbane – that “certainly in Europe, we are the dominant games broadcaster, and I challenge anyone around the world to find a more immersive Olympic experience than our total content plan, between our linear, streaming, and digital content plans.
“The remarkable opportunity and challenge is the sheer scale of how much of the Olympics we want to bring to sports fans.”
