Eurosport Germany is to broadcast daily live coverage from the German House at the 2020 Olympic Games after reaching an agreement with Deutsche Sport Marketing, the commercial of the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB).
The agreement was announced here at the Spobis conference in Düsseldorf by Susanne Aigner-Drews, managing director of Discovery Deutschland.
The German House is the central meeting place and events hosting venue of the DOSB at the Olympics.
Eurosport Germany will show one live broadcast from the venue every day in a continuation of the offering at the 2018 PyeongChang winter games.
The live coverage will be shown from 5pm (CET), offering a round-up of the main action each day.
Discovery holds the Olympics broadcast rights across Europe (excluding Russia) in a €1.3bn ($1.43bn) deal running from 2018 to 2024.
In Germany, Discovery sublicensed free-to-air rights to public broadcasters ARD and ZDF but will itself offer live multi-platform coverage of all competitions from Tokyo 2020.
Aigner said: “Our vision is to offer the most extensive Olympics experience of all time…we want to make it the most innovative Games of all time.”
Aigner ceded that audiences for the daily evening highlights show in PyeongChang had been disappointing and explained a repositioning of the programme.
Eurosport’s PyeongChang 2018 Olympics highlights show was described as a “ratings flop” in the German press, pulling in an average of just 170,000 viewers (a 0.5-per-cent market share).
She said: “The presentation of the evening show in PyeongChang didn’t work out as well as we’d hoped before. We want to offer a new evening show with more information about the results, a broadcast offering replays of sports that have taken place during the day.
“Looking at the number of viewers on Eurosport, then we expected more viewers to watch the evening show from PyeongChang. But it was important that we produced locally what was also being produced overall at an international level.
“Eurosport doesn’t only look at the German-speaking countries, which are under our responsibility, but what is going on from a European perspective.”
Drews added that the viewing numbers are not the only key factor when assessing the success of Eurosport’s Olympics coverage in Germany, particularly given many viewers are used to watching on ARD and ZDF.
She remarked: “For us it’s a success if it’s successful overall on the international stage and viewers independently tell us that they liked the coverage and we hope that they stay with Eurosport and not only during the 17 [competition] days].”