Seven years in the making and billions of dollars spent in preparation, the 17-day Summer Olympic Games draws millions of overseas fans to the host city and is televised to billions. Globally, people – the dedicated sports fans and the casual viewers – want to know what’s going on at the world’s largest multi-sport event.

Sports fans of the early Games had to wait until the next day to find out if their favourite team or athlete had won. The news would be relayed via newspapers and film newsreels shown in cinemas. The first live Olympic radio broadcasts were made at the 1924 Paris Games and live television coverage across Europe (18 cities) began at the 1960 Games in Rome.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) didn’t fully comprehend the influence of television in 1960. In his book Inside the Olympics, Dick Pound, a former Olympic athlete who went on to serve under four IOC presidents, wrote: “IOC president Avery Brundage announced with great portent that the Olympics had got along very well without television for 60 years and could do so in the future as well.” The Games in Rome proved him wrong. But it wasn’t until the 1984 Los Angeles Games that the IOC “woke up to the economic reality”, with the Los Angeles Olympic Organising Committee paying IOC their one-third entitlement of US$33 million.

What does it take to broadcast the Olympics today? The Athens Olympic Broadcasting Organisation televised 3,800 hours of live Olympics coverage covering 300 events, using more than 1,000 cameras and 450 videotape machines, and a team of 3,700 working with more than 12,000 broadcasting personnel.

The television broadcast of the 2004 Athens Games is the strongest to date, with 3.9 billion viewers in 220 countries and territories. More than 300 television channels aired 35,000 hours of coverage over 17 days – a 24% increase compared to the 2000 Sydney Games.

Viewing of the Athens Games in Asia was surprisingly high when taking into account the time difference. On average, Asian viewers watched 11 hours of coverage. Japan had the highest average consumption per TV viewer worldwide at 29.46 hours (Austria followed with 23.42 hours). In China, 52.6 million viewers tuned in for the closing ceremony to watch the Olympic flag being passed from Athens to Beijing.

The Olympic Games television broadcasts have always appealed equally to men and women, but it was the Athens Games that started to attract a younger audience:36% of European viewers were aged between 16 and 45.
46% of Asian viewers were under the age of 45. The female viewing audience reached 51% while in Europe it was 46%.48% of the viewers in Central and South America were under the age of 35.

Beijing Olympic Broadcasting is expected to utilise 60 outside broadcast vans and 1,000 cameras to air 4,000 hours of live coverage. Over 200 broadcasters will air the Games bringing in an estimated US$1.6 billion in global television rights.

The Olympic spirit lives on.