Windy City Olympic Blues
October 6, 2009 |
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By Jim Barry, CEA’s Digital Answer Man
How will we be watching sports on TV seven years from now? The question arose last week, specifically, how will we be watching the 2016 Olympics? I was in Chicago on the “Digital Answer Man Media Tour” while the city was awash in Olympic fever awaiting the venue decision for the 2016 Olympiad. After taping a gadget segment with old friend Ed Curran of WBBM TV we got to the “future of TV” question for a planned special on the Games.
I expect that seven years from now we’ll watch the Olympic Games – and most other fare — anywhere we want, at any time we want, and on any number of devices and displays. Just think of where we’ve come in the recent decades with cable, satellite and Internet delivery, DVRs, Slingbox — even athletes “tweeting” from Beijing last year. The broadcast rights for those games haven’t been settled yet, but it’s clear that technology will bring many more choices of ways to watch the events, officially, along with endless athlete- and spectator-generated commentary.
We’ll watch the events on big-screen displays in High-def, even 3D. We’ll watch them on desktop, notebook, netbook and tablet computers. We’ll watch them on hand-held devices live or stored on the increasingly prodigious memories these gadgets carry. “Content anywhere,” has become a buzz phrase in the industry in recent years and I expect that by 2016 that promise will be realized for the Olympic Games.
Unfortunately, our discussion most likely ended up on the cutting room floor. The day after we taped, the air went out of the Windy City with the announcement that the Games were awarded to a South American city for the first time. The people of Chicago will have a variety of new tech options for Olympic viewing, but, alas, if they want to see the Games in person, they’ll have to travel to Rio.
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