adambowie.com

Category: Sport

  • Paralympics

    Here’s a stat for you: Number of hours of coverage of the Beijing Olympics on US television: 3,600 (2,900 of which was live) Number of hours of coverage of the Beijing Paralympics on US television: 1.5 (0 of which is live) That’s right. Of all the US TV channels, there is a single 90 minute…

  • Scary Thought About Setanta Football Issue

    As the Setanta issue rumbles on with no terrestrial highlights likely to be available for a terrestrial service for the Croatia away game for England on Wednesday, I’ve just had a scary thought. Essentially Setanta purchased both live coverage and highlights of the fixture. But they’ve declined to sell on those highlight rights. The radio…

  • 4.7bn Watched The Olympics?

    Neilsen Media Research – a fine media research company who I have contracts with via my employer – has released details of a story suggesting that 4.7bn people watched at least some of the Olympic coverage last month. That’s out of a rough estimate of 6.6bn for the planet’s population. I’m always deeply suspicious of…

  • Tour of Britain – Stage 1

    The 2008 edition of the Tour of Britain kicked off today with a 10 lap circuit of London running down the Embankment from Big Ben to the Tower of London and back.

  • Setanta v Terrestrial – The Battle Continues

    So if you don’t have Setanta, and can’t make it to a pub that’s showing Setanta, the only coverage you’re going to have of England’s World Cup qualifiers against Andorra on Saturday, and Croatia next week is going to be goal clips on the news. There is, of course, radio coverage too. Media Guardian reports…

  • England Match Not On Terrestrial?

    Well – as things stand, England’s World Cup qualifying games against Croatia and Andora will not have so much as highlights coverage on either BBC or ITV according to a piece in The Times. It comes down to the fact that while England’s home games were sold to ITV as part of a larger deal…

  • Olympic Golds and Looking Forward To 2012

    This morning saw three more British golds, particularly a pair in the sprints at the Velodrome with Victoria Pendleton and Chris Hoy winning. But I’m now beginning to get concerned about the logisitics of 2012. No, I’m not thinking about how we can possibly top the Chinese opening ceremony, it’s more to do with the…

  • Olympics on Digital TV

    Once upon a time, the Olympics were broadcast on both ITV and the BBC. For a lot of the time, they’d show the same events, and if you were interested in a minority sport, you could probably forget it unless a Brit had a chance of a medal. Now coverage might be “limited” to the…

  • Still No Live Cricket on Terrestrial Television

    Under a new deal announced today by the ECB… precisely nothing changes. Sky has retained live rights to… well… everything. And Five has a highlights package. Sky undoubtedly does a superb job. They’ve got lots of resources and they’ve innovated with new technology high-definition coverage, and super-slomo cameras (Although I did laugh on Saturday when…

  • Wimbledon Live Online

    So today is the start of Wimbledon, and as ever, the BBC has enormously comprehensive coverage. On digital TV they have the exceptional service that allows you to pick and choose which game you watch, and this is all replicated online (for UK users). Five Live and Five Live Sports Xtra have commentaries available throughout…

  • The Free Tibet Protest (AKA The Olympic Torch Relay)

    So I thought that I’d head down to see the Olympic Torch Relay – the multi-country tour of the Olympic torch as it wends it way towards Beijing for this summer’s Olympic Games. It was obvious from the outset that following recent increased violence inside Tibet, that this was also going to be used to…

  • Sky And The Champions’ League

    Media Guardian are reporting that Sky has won the majority of the Champions’ League games for the three years beginning in 2009. It’s thought that they offered more than £240m representing nearly a 50% increase over what they had previously paid. For that sum, they get all the games bar one – a single Wednesday…

  • 1 Billion Viewers

    Yesterday the news broke that the Premier League is considering giving everyone an extra fixture which will be played in one of five cities internationally. I’ll leave others to debate the pros and cons of such a scheme – or “brand extension”. But plenty of reports claim that “an estimated 1bn people watched the Premier…