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Media gearing up for Olympics

By Wang Shanshan (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-04-28 10:10

The Olympics may focus on athletics, but it is also an enormous business. No other event on earth can arouse a strong passion among millions of global television viewers.

This means an incredible amount of money from ambitious multinationals competing for sponsorships. Even more lucrative are earnings from selling global broadcast rights. Currently broadcast rights account for 53 percent of overall Olympic revenue in a four-year cycle, according to official figures.

And this year the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has expanded its source of revenue by promoting a brand-new product. The Beijing Olympics will be the first in the Games' history to sell its "new media broadcast right".

The IOC coined the name two years ago when it started to sell Internet and mobile phone broadcast rights to the Beijing Olympic Games.

There is no official figure about how many broadcasters bought the new genre, but the IOC website shows that i-CABLE in Hong Kong, Television New Zealand, National Broadcasting Company (NBC) in the United States and NHK in Japan are among the buyers.

CCTV.com, the digital arm of the China Central Television Station (CCTV), bought the new media broadcast rights for the Chinese mainland and Macao.

The money paid for the new media broadcast right is "even more" than that for television broadcast rights, says Liu Lu, director of the Copyright Protection Center of CCTV.com in an interview with China Business Weekly.

"This may be a brand-new chance for CCTV.com, and it is for sure a brand-new challenge for all our anti-piracy efforts," she says.

"Copyright protection is a top agenda for management now because the Olympic programs at CCTV.com may be uploaded onto other websites after they are downloaded and people may visit those websites instead."

Advertisements at websites are not necessarily booked a few weeks or even several months beforehand, as with television channels, as Internet ad sales are largely based on the number of clicks, says Liu.

"The number of clicks that CCTV.com receives is much higher during special occasions like the Spring Festival and the advertisements sell very well as a result," she says.

"We expect another peak lasting two weeks at least during the Beijing Olympics."

On the other hand, piracy of the programs on CCTV.com is widespread. "Whenever you open a website to download during the Spring Festival, you can always find hundreds of uploads of CCTV's signature Chinese New Year Eve Party," says Wang Yangbin, founder and chief executive officer of Vobile Inc.

But with its patented technology, Wang's company is tracking the downloaded websites and making regular reports to CCTV.com about the pirated programs.

"We believe we lost big money due to piracy of the Chinese New Year Eve Party. There could have been much more clicks and the ensuing advertisements if Internet users were only able to watch it at our website and authorized sites," says Liu.

Likewise piracy is also a headache for NBC, according to Sheau Ng, vice-president of broadcast and consumer technology of NBC Universal. NBC is part of NBC Universal, a media and entertainment company formed in May 2004 by the combination of General Electric's NBC with Vivendi Universal Entertainment.

NBC bought the television broadcast rights and the new media broadcast rights in one deal two years ago, according to the IOC website.

"We have been dealing with Internet piracy for a long time and have come to the conclusion that we cannot kill piracy. We can only make piracy more and more difficult," says Ng.

NBC has been setting up legal and technical barriers for piracy, he says. It also uses technology from Vobile Inc, called Video DNA, to compare contents of its own website and those of a number of other websites and discover pirated programs.

It is also making sure that its programs are more convenient to download and view than pirated versions.

"We have been thrilled at the success of Apple's iTunes and come to see that consumers in the US are not only interested in free content. They care more about the quality of the content and the convenience of access, and they are willing to pay," says Ng.

As for CCTV.com, it plans to use legal, technical and administrative measures to protect its online copyright during the Games, says Liu.

It says it has collected ample evidence of piracy at some websites by using the Vobile's technology and there is a possibility that it may take a few of these websites to court, she says.

It is also using two other new technologies to ensure the security of the contents in the transmission process before they are uploaded on the CCTV.com website.

The digital arm of CCTV is also trying to persuade the authorized websites to install a filtering facility that automatically prevents any CCTV.com content from being uploaded.

"We are talking with the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) about whether it will make the filtering facility a prerequisite if the websites want the certificates to broadcast video programs," she says.

SARFT will re-evaluate the websites' certificates later this year, she adds.

But Wu Genliang, CEO of the Pomoho.com, one of the largest websites for video program downloads in China, says that it is "unrealistic" for CCTV.com to try to protect its online copyright during the Games without launching any commercial cooperation with the download websites.

"If I delete the pirate programs on my website and people at other websites still keep them, people will go to the other websites and I will suffer from a sharp drop in clicks," he says.

Wu says he prefers to cooperate with CCTV.com in profiting from the Olympic programs.

"For example, if I sell any more advertisements as a result of the more clicks at my website after the Olympic programs are uploaded, I am willing to give CCTV.com 40 percent of the revenue," he says.

CCTV.com also believes that it is being realistic in cooperating with the download websites.

"They (the websites) may care more about the copyright if they have commercial benefits from it," says Liu.

She says CCTV.com is drafting a plan to share its Olympic programs with the websites. The plan is expected to come out in early May.

"It is basically that the more money a website gives us, the more programs we will authorize it to broadcast," Liu says.