CBC extends Olympic rights through 2024
Public broadcaster to carry next 5 Games, contribute to IOC's new Olympic Channel
CBC/Radio-Canada has added the Canadian broadcast rights for the 2022 and 2024 Olympics.
The deal, announced Wednesday by the International Olympic Committee, means that the public broadcaster will continue to be Canada's Olympic network and official broadcaster for the next five Olympic Games, including Rio 2016, Pyeongchang 2018 and Tokyo 2020.
The 2022 Winter Olympics will be held in Beijing. Five cities are competing to host the 2024 Summer Games:
- Budapest, Hungary.
- Hamburg, Germany.
- Los Angeles.
- Paris.
- Rome.
CBC/Radio-Canada will also be a broadcast partner, from 2016 until at least 2023, for the IOC's new global digital Olympic Channel. The public broadcaster will provide Canadian sports content to support the channel's focus on the Olympic movement between Games.
This is clear recognition of the exceptional coverage CBC/Radio-Canada provided for the 2014 Sochi Olympic Winter Games, the most watched Olympics in history.- CBC/Radio-Canada president/CEO Hubert Lacroix on being awarded broadcast rights for 2022, 2024 Olympics
"CBC/Radio-Canada's best-in-class coverage, including expansive digital offerings, helped change the way Canadians engage with the Olympics," CBC/Radio-Canada president and CEO Hubert Lacroix said in a statement.
"This is clear recognition of the exceptional coverage CBC/Radio-Canada provided for the 2014 Sochi Olympic Winter Games, the most watched Olympics in history."
IOC president Thomas Bach called CBC/Radio-Canada "a strong supporter of sport in Canada."
As lead broadcaster, CBC/Radio-Canada will work again with its primary Olympic broadcast partner, Bell Media, along with Rogers Media.
"The broadcast partnership model we've put forward is respectful of the stature of the Games, fiscally responsible and perfectly aligned with CBC/Radio-Canada's current strategic plan," Lacroix said.
CBC's biggest TV audience from the most recent Olympics, in Sochi, Russia, came from Canada's victory over Sweden in the men's hockey final, with an estimated overnight average minute audience of 5,764,000.
Digital records set
CBC broke many digital records during the Sochi Olympics, and its app was downloaded more than 2.5 million times.
Over the course of Sochi 2014, cbc.ca/olympics and olympiques.radio-canada.ca together received more than 256 million website views while the app garnered more than 380 million views for a combined total of more than 636 million views from Feb. 6 to 23, 2014.
An unprecedented 10.7 million Canadians watched Olympic content via online streams on the CBC and/or SRC sites throughout Sochi 2014, and they consumed approximately 14 million hours of online video content. This is almost twice as much as was consumed during the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games.