In 1984 at Los Angeles, the American ABC-TV network provided its facilities in order to produce an international signal for 156 different countries. It was an Olympics beset with boycotts, so it was fine that ABC used its limited resources to aim most of its cameras at American athletes. It was the final Summer Games covered by ABC in the U.S., and when NBC took over for Seoul 1988, there were differences of opinion between the Korean host broadcaster and the entity that was providing a healthy chunk of the Games' financing -- NBC had contributed $300 million in return for 179 hours of American coverage. Something within the system needed to change.
After Seoul, the International Olympic Committee amended its media guidelines to allow for a broadcast entity tied to the Games organizing committee, not the host country or its home broadcast rightsholder. The first independent organization was Radio Television Olimpica, which brought together a number of different national entities to create all-encompassing, multi-feed coverage of the Barcelona 1992 competitions.
For the first time in Olympic history, there were pictures from every single competition, every single second of action. National rightsholders such as NBC were permitted to have one or two cameras per venue to point at national athletes and mix in, but the raw feed was designed to be nation-neutral. And RTO helped set the stage for a television concept a decade ahead of its time, one of the most tragically misunderstood media enterprises in history. The very mention of its name recalls the Hindenburg, the Titanic and Ishtar all at once.
The Olympics Triplecast.
NBC had paid $401 million for the rights to broadcast the Barcelona Olympics, and stood to lose at least $100 million on advertising shortfall. To help make up the difference, Cablevision chairman and Home Box Office creator Chuck Dolan (an NBC partner) hatched a plan -- package Olympic coverage in three commercial-free 24-hour channels (red, white and blue) in return for sums that dwarfed that of 16 days' worth of HBO. The Triplecast would cost $170 for 15 days plus pins, a viewer's guide and a water bottle (the "gold" package), $125 for coverage alone ("silver") and $95 for a partial package that would just get you on the podium.
The secret, lost to history, is that RTO provided the signal -- all NBC did was add low-budget, garishly-lit studio shows and send commentators to talk for hours over the live footage. To sell the public on an alien product, NBC spent millions on advertising. And it didn't work, even though there were clear warning signs two months before the Olympics began. It's not known how much it cost to stamp cable bills with subtle ads.
Thanks to "misinterpreted research," under 165,000 gold packages were sold, far below the 2 million Cablevision had estimated. Hoping to save face, deep price cuts once the Games started. That didn't work either.
A big part of the problem was that this was a transition period in American television. Cable was a fractious landscape with many different local mini-monopolies, and pay-per-view was far from being the impulse, push-button operation it is today with digital cable and satellite. In 1992, non-Cablevision customers had to drive to their local cable operator's office to rent and install a special decoder receiver box to watch the Triplecast -- which understandably turned many viewers off. So did the three-screen split that CNBC displayed during the Games' second week in a last-ditch attempt to entice new subscribers. By the time it was over, the Triplecast lost over $50 million.
"I blame myself for all of this," Dolan told the New York Times. "But a mea culpa can only go so far. We blew it from an economic point of view. We lost that money. But this is part of being in this business. We think it was an appropriate risk."
What is important to remember is that NBC and Cablevision's risk had virtually nothing to do with the programming, but the prevailing wisdom in an age when "international feed" was an unknown term was that NBC had wasted millions on 1,080 hours of camera-pointing. The Triplecast was a marketing failure, not a television one. The international feed model continued successfully, as Lillehammer 1994's broadcasting service was beamed to 120 countries (including, for the first time, African ones), and the broadcast operation generated profits of over $500 million.
The 1996, 2000 and 2004 Games were broadcast in their entirety in much the same blanket fashion as Barcelona. Atlanta Olympic Broadcasting (AOB) followed RTO. Sydney and Athens were handled by a private organization called International Sports Broadcasting. And by 2000, NBC used its cable holdings to create "The Complete Olympics" -- a four-network package made up entirely of international feeds.
In the process, the International Olympic Committee moved away from independent contractors and took a more active role in the way its product is shown on television. Olympic Broadcasting Services, based in Madrid and under the direct supervision of the IOC, was created in 2001 as a permanent Host Broadcaster for the Olympics. The Beijing Games are the first that OBS has covered, under the temporary umbrella of BOB -- Beijing Olympic Broadcasting.
BOB is a temporary 16-day organization with amazing scope. It has a staff of four thousand, utilizes 1,000 cameras, and will generate 3,800 hours of Olympic footage (of which NBC only offers half with its free streaming service). An estimated 30 billion people worldwide will watch BOB footage.
But the most remarkable thing about raw Olympic feed is its complete neutrality -- no shots of anguished faces, no lingering on either victory or defeat, and equal time for athletes and fans of any and all competing teams. If it wasn't for BOB, NBC wouldn't have all those hours of Olympics to show, couldn't fill seven networks with televised coverage. But the network has learned its lessons, and has turned this into a low-risk proposition -- no pay-per-view, no special boxes, no extra marketing... just a website skin and a bunch of hard drives.
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Sportswriter 
