Mark Thompson, director general of UK public-service broadcaster the BBC, issued a strong defence of the broadcaster’s sports rights strategy in the wake of the deal signed earlier this week for the rights to the Olympic Games of 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020.
Thompson said that the deal with the International Olympic Committee was the latest in a number of rights arrangements which “stretch out for many years and which guarantee that sport will continue to be a central part of the diet of licence-payers.”
The BBC has received criticism over its approach to sports rights as a consequence of its budget cuts. Thompson said that a lot of “nonsense” had been written about the BBC’s relationship with sport.
Writing in a BBC blog, he said: “First, we know that the public care passionately about sport on the BBC. Given the option, they overwhelmingly choose to watch sport on our services rather than on those of our rivals: the recent final of Euro 2012 in which the coverage on BBC1 gained six times more viewers than that on ITV1 is a good case in point. BBC Television currently shows just two per cent of the hours of TV sport broadcast in the UK but that two per cent represents over 40 per cent of the hours actually consumed by the public. That’s far more than any other broadcaster, including BSkyB.”
He insisted that it was right for licence fee income to be spent on sports content. “For decades, the public have valued the unique way the BBC covers sport: its technical professionalism, the quality of its commentary and analysis, the absence of interruptions for commercials. In recent years, we’ve backed up that traditional distinctiveness with a new burst of innovation both in linear coverage and via the BBC Sport website.”
Thompson said that the BBC had had to make some “unpalatable” choices with regards to its sports rights, citing the examples of horse racing and Formula One, but maintained this has been a necessary strategy. “Like most other public organisations, we are having to live within a tight budget but those who claimed that Delivering Quality First meant that the BBC was turning its back on sport were very wide of the mark,” he said.
Thompson continued: “We have relinquished our remaining television commitments to horse-racing and successfully renegotiated our Formula One rights to create a sharing arrangement with Sky; although it is clearly not as attractive as retaining exclusive rights, this latter deal has kept half the races live on the BBC, broadly maintained the reach of our Formula One coverage and will save us more than £150 million (€187.5 million/$234.4 million) over the lifetime of the contract – a significant contribution to our savings targets.”
Thompson maintained the BBC had targeted the successful protection of its “core” rights, adding: “Wherever possible, we’ve tried to keep the costs of renewal down: compare the recent near-flat renewal of Premier League highlights (now including BBC iPlayer rights) with the reported 70 per cent increase in the live rights. But we always intended to protect the core of our rights portfolio and we set aside enough money to do so. To give you an idea of scale, our annual financial commitment to sport will remain broadly in line with our annual budget for domestic network news and current affairs.”