MULTI-MEDIA REPORTING OF THE OLYMPIC GAMES

Transcription

1 MULTI-MEDIA REPORTING OF THE OLYMPIC GAMES by JEAN-LOUP CHAPPELET Cable-television, fibre optics, telecommunication and direct broadcasting satellites, high-speed data transmission, video-text, video-broadcasting, video-discs, video-cassettes... The list of new techniques for the transmission and reproduction of images and the spoken and written word seems to grow longer every day. What consequences does all this have for the media coverage of the Olympic Games? 561

2 T he Olympic Charter enjoins the IOC to secure the widest possible audience for the Olympic Games (Rule 3) and to take all necessary steps to facilitate the work of the different mass media in covering them (Rule 51). Nowadays, this undertaking involves reporting and the media in the broadest sense of the terms. In the past, reporting amounted to the article brought back by a journalist sent to the scene. The media were confined to the local newspaper. Then came the cinema, radio and television, which created other forms of reporting: cinema news, radio and television reporting. The same applies today : new media or technical advances in existing ones are already giving rise to new forms of journalism and new prospects for the future. This article will be examining briefly the major spin-offs within the context of the coverage of the Olympic Games, which are among the largest media events in the world. Particular attention will be given to changes in the form and the nature of reporting rather than any financial or legal implications which may arise as a result. TELEVISION To give credit where it is due, it must be said that television is the medium which has made the greatest contribution towards the worldwide presentation of the Games. Television is currently undergoing a technical revolution in its transmission techniques. For several years now, cable networks and, more recently, telecommunication and direct broadcast satellites (DBS) have existed alongside Hertzian ground relays, although the DBS have still not got off the ground. These distribution systems are responses to the overloading of the Hertzian waves and the problems of shadow zones. They operate both in combination (the cable networks receive their programmes from satellites) and in competition (individual parabolic antennae render the networks superfluous! with one another. Above all, they offer the viewer a wider choice of programmes and also provide an opportunity of creating new free or pay channels. Some regions of the United States or Japan already receive several dozen stations by cable. In Europe, where the State has tended to be more strict, there are already a dozen major new channels. Some of them cross borders thanks to telecommunication satellites, later to be replaced by DBS. There are even channels specialising in sport, such as ESPN, SportsVision and SportsChannel (USA) or ScreenSport (GBR) as well as projects such as Sports Mediengesellschaft (FRG). The idea of a pan-european channel, put forward by the European Broadcasting Union, is making headway (slowly) under the name of Olympus, so dear to the world of sport. Its broadcasts will be subtitled in six languages. But in order that this channel may attract a multinational audience, its programmes will have to be first and foremost of a cultural nature in the wider sense of the word, which means that sport will feature prominently. We recently published an article in this section (Olympic Review 213) in which the implications of cable networks for the Olympic Games were examined with particular reference to their effect on negotiations for television rights. In 1984 in Los Angeles, the multilateral programme ( World Feed ) comprised up to sixteen different images coming from different competition venues. The producers of the broadcasting networks which had purchased the rights frequently found themselves faced with very difficult choices. With the proliferation of new channels, insofar as they take part in the purchase of rights (possibly in association with others), it is possible to imagine, for instance, specialised reporting of particular sports or serving a particular continent as well as coverage of the cultural programme and other newsworthy aspects of the Games. The choice would no longer lie solely with the producers, but also with the viewers. Thus problems of chauvinism, incomplete coverage and time shifts as they affect reporting would be greatly alleviated. This wealth of Olympic images is demonstrated by the decision of ESPN, an American cable-network which considered the broadcasting of some 200 hours of tape of the competitions in Los Angeles during summer 1985 to be a potentially profitable undertaking. Some of the sequences were being given their first showing in the United States. RADIO AND PHOTOGRAPHY Television s poor relation, radio, is nevertheless a very important medium for the spreading of the Olympic Games in the Third World and also, let us not forget, in countries placed at a disadvantage by the time zones. The transformation of televisual technology, in particular the adoption of the D-2 Mac Paquets standard for Europe, will have two major spin-offs for radio : an improvement in sound quality due to stereophonic broadcasting and a reduction in the cost of live satellite link-ups, which 562

3 will probably lead to an increase in the numbers of radio commentators at the competition venues. Photography is an indispensable adjunct to all radio and television broadcasting, because it gives a quality of image which even high-resolution TV (1125 lines instead of the 625 or 525 currently in use) can not achieve. Up to now, it has, however, been the least favoured of the Olympic media. Photographers often had to struggle hard to gain their positions in the stadia. There too, however, things are looking up. Telecommunication satellites enable colour photographs to be transmitted to the other side of the globe at low cost and with high quality. This facility was tested for the first time at the Games in Los Angeles. Scitex equipment made it A technological revolution in transmitting photographs : the scanner for colour photos. possible to send a colour photograph to Europe in 90 seconds or even faster, depending on the data transmission rates available. In the years to come, agencies will offer this service as a matter of course, which will mean a corresponding improvement in reporting of the Games. THE NEW MEDIA In addition to the well known types of media briefly outlined above, new means of distributing information are appearing on the scene which can, without exaggeration, be described as new media. We shall be examining two of the main ones here : videobroadcasting and video-text. Video-broadcasting is linked to the advent of giant screens, which can be used to broadcast television images or text. Several technologies co-exist at the present time and screens between 20 and 200 m 2 are available : from groups of normal television screens (video walls) to the video-ready screens which have been used at the Olympic Games since those in Montreal in Boxing and the football World Cup matches of 1978 and 1982 have also had the benefit of such long-distance transmission. In July 1985, the Live Aid 2 concert was video-broadcast to several capital cities including Paris, where a 100 m 2 screen had been set up in the sports palace at Bercy. Almost tickets were sold at 100 FFR each. An agreement was recently made between the French football federation and a service company which intends to videobroadcast national championship matches to 300 auditoriums starting in autumn In some years time, laser video-projectors will considerably improve the quality of these images. It is amusing to note that this was the spirit of the first broadcasting of the Games in The Reichsfernsehen placed its first television screens in public places in Berlin and in six of the mayor cities of Germany. Although based on a television signal, videobroadcasting is aimed at a collective audience. The opening and closing ceremonies of the Games would be ideally suited to this new medium. Before marching into the Los Angeles Coliseum the athletes were able to follow the first part of the opening ceremony on a giant screen installed in the Memorial Sports Arena. Another branch of technology which is on the way to becoming a fully-fledged medium is videotext. After a long period of gestation, it seems to have finally taken off in Europe and in North America. It enables the user to access, by means of a spe- 563

4 cialised terminal, data banks in all areas via an already existing network - the telephone system - and for the cost of a local call. It is closely related to teletext, which is carried free via the radio waves that transmit television signals in what is known as the suppression interval. Although it is not interactive, teletext has had a certain success. Many viewers are now equipped with the requisite decoder. Most teletext programmes include the latest sports news which can be consulted page by page at any time. In the sphere of sport, video-text has been primarily used as a system for consulting results and athletes biographies, for example at the 1st Athletics World Championships in Helsinki (1983), the European Football Championships in France (1984) and the Roland Garros tennis internationals (1984 and 1985). In Italy, the results of many team games including baseball can be consulted in this way. With the exception of an experiment in Sarajevo, neither teletext nor video-text has yet been used at the Olympic Games. They do however provide a means of keeping the viewer up to date with detailed results of the competitions he is watching in a way the commentator or even the stadium scoreboard cannot do, as well as presenting other information such as the athletes previous achievements. Imagine part of the Electronic Messaging System (EMS) as it was used in Los Angeles accessible not only to the Olympic Family but also to all telephone subscribers. At any rate, much will depend on the extension of video-text, which, in some countries, in particular Great Britain, the United States, France and the Federal Republic of Germany, already plays a very important role. VIDEOGRAMMES After looking at these direct media, I should like to say a few words about the media which rely on a physical support such as a video-cassette or videodisc and which are therefore suitable for a posteriori reporting of the Games. The cinema comes into this category, but does not require further mention within the context of this article as it has not undergone major technical advances liable to affect its current contribution : the official film of the Games. Video-cassettes of major football and tennis matches have been available for several years now and form a small market linked with the rapid development of home video. The IOC has worked together with the company ABC Video Enterprises to produce and distribute for the first time a cassette showing highlights of the Games of the XXlllrd Olympiad. It was placed on the market a few days after the closing ceremony and some 80,000 copies have been sold in the United States at a price of $30 a piece. Specialist video-cassettes of the various Olympic sports are a possibility. Most of the technical films envisaged in the byelaw to Rule 51 of the Olympic Charter have already been produced more cheaply and quickly in the form of videos. Official Olympic films could also be distributed in exactly the same way as ordinary films. Although less successful than the video-cassette, the video-disc offers the same possibilities for distributing pre-recorded programmes. However, its real interest lies in the fact that an image can be accessed more or less directly without the need to pass through others (even very fast), as is the case with the sequential form of access necessary with a tape. This flexibility is made use of by travel agencies, for instance, as it enables them to give their customers a filmed catalogue of their destinations. In a video-disc of the athletics events at the Games it would be possible to consult almost instantaneously the 10 second sequence of the 100 m, for instance, a facility which would no doubt be greatly appreciated by journalists who were not able to be present at the event, whether it took place that day or four years before. When fibre optic networks and image banks have been fully developed, it should be possible to call up a particular sequence at long distance by means of video-text. If we take away the image, the sound remains. The fanfares of the Games and the music of the ceremonies have existed since 1968 in the Form of LP records and, since 1976, in the form of cassettes. These recordings, which are on sale to the public, were generally produced for the OCOGs by specialised companies, for example Polydor for Montreal and Columbia Records for Los Angeles. Rule 54 of the Olympic Charter fixes the IOC s rights over this offshoot of Olympic reporting. AND THE WRlTTEN PRESS? The written press always has an important role to play in the multi-media coverage of the Games. It already benefits from the advances in the transmission of black and white and colour photography described above for the production of its daily editions as well as from international data transmission networks which enable journalists to extend their deadlines. 564

5 Magazines can bring out special editions illustrated with magnificent colour photographs only hours after the competitions took place. These sell extremely well. Nowadays, souvenir books of the Games are in the shops only a few weeks after the closing ceremony. It is journalists from the written press who will feed the video-text kiosks and who will elucidate with their commentaries the raw results distributed in this way. The Notes & Quotes issued by the press service of the Los Angeles OCOG and available on EMS were a precurser of things to come. They went down very well among the members of the Olympic family. Finally, computerised systems of decentralised production and printing such as are already used by a number of newspapers (e.g. the international Herald Tribune, the WallStreet Journal, the Financial Times and USA Today) allow us to glimpse a possibility of creating an Olympic daily paper to be produced in the host city during the period of the Games and published simultaneously throughout the world. There is no law against dreaming! That concludes our brief tour of the media landscape we may expect to see at the Games in a few Olympiad s time. Two main points do, however, stand out from the general picture. First of all, these miraculous multi-directional communication networks will not be set up for events taking place only every four years, however prestigious they may be. The IOC and the OCOCs will not therefore be able to improve the quality of Olympic coverage and enable it to reach a larger audience beyond the limits of facilities existing at that particular moment in the future and subject to knowledge of their availability some four to six years in advance. That is why it is so important for the Olympic Movement to pay great attention to technological progress. Secondly, modern reporting of the Olympic Games should combine all the available media in a coherent whole, in which each one complements the others. Live coverage in all its forms, old and new, should not be allowed to eclipse the slower or delayed forms of Olympic reporting which also have their role to play in serving the ideals of Olympism. J.-L. C. 1. RTL Plus, 3-SAT and Sat- 1 (in German), Music Box and Sky channel (in English), TV-5 and Canal Plus (in French), Canale 5, Rete- 4 and Italia-1 (in Italian) etc. 2. The United States TV rights for this concert were divided up as follows : live integral transmission on pay-channel MTV, prime time (20-23 hours) on ABC and other times on local channels. Sport in Border Area by Wang Hu. First Prize winner at the Art and Sport exposition in Beijing (See p. 547). 565