ERR chair: Eurosport may be only viewing options for next Olympics
Board chair at public broadcaster ERR Erik Roose says that television rights for the Olympic Games in 2022 and 2024 are hanging in the balance, portal Delfi reports.
ERR last broadcast the Olympics, in Rio in 2016, and missed out on the 2018 winter games and the now-canceled 2020 Tokyo games, due to the asking tag of €1.1 million being too high.
Roose told Delfi (link in Estonian) that ERR would be able to buy the rights for about the same sum it had done in 2014 for its coverage of the Winter Olympics that year, but the Discovery Channel, which owns the broadcasting rights to the games, said this would be insufficient.
2022 sees the Winter Olympics scheduled to take place in Beijing, China, with the main summer games to follow in Paris in 2024.
At the same time, commercial TV channels TV3, owned by Viasat, and Kanal 2, owned by the Postimees Group, are reportedly no longer interested in covering the games, having nonetheless expressed an interest and in so doing helped to drive the cost up from the hundreds of thousands to around a million euros, Roose said.
"This has led to the hypothetical risk that Estonian people will have to watch the Olympics on Eurosport," Roose told the portal.
The Discovery Channel also owns Eurosport.
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Editor: Andrew Whyte
