Rogers Media president Keith Pelley said that his company’s decision to pull out of the Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium for the 2014 and 2016 Games was the result of careful evaluation of both the financial and programming implications.
Rogers announced this morning that it would not bid on the 2014 and 2016 Olympic Games, citing “scheduling conflicts” and “financial priorities.” The decision does not impact the partnership between Rogers and Bell Media for the 2012 London Olympics.
“The Olympics of 2014 and 2016 was a property that we needed to evaluate,” said Pelley, a one-time TSN executive who arrived at Rogers last summer after steering the Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium through the 2010 Vancouver Games.
“You evaluate every property on many different factors: how it affects scheduling, what’s the business model, does it affect your brand, how does it affect the consumer? When we put all the variables together, it led us to [conclude] ‘This really isn’t a fit for us right now.’”
Pelley said that primetime coverage of next year’s London Olympics is already going to create “quite a conflict” with established Sportsnet properties such as Rogers Cup tennis and Toronto Blue Jays telecasts.
“It’s like buying something that you don’t need,” he said of the 2014 and 2016 Games. “You put that together with what we believe is a financial situation that is not positive, it made for an easy decision.”
Rogers and consortium partner Bell Media are increasingly fierce broadcast rivals, embroiled in a ratings war that encompasses their respective sports properties Sportsnet and TSN, as well as their conventional channels Citytv and CTV.
In addition, Rogers recently opened up yet another front in the ratings war with the launch of a 24-hour news channel for the Toronto market that will directly compete with the Bell Media-owned CP24.
Elsewhere, Rogers and BCE are bitter rivals in the cable, wireless, internet and home phone sectors.
“That was a variable that came into the mix for sure,” said Pelley. “But domestic Games [like the 2010 Vancouver Games] are special, they’re once in a lifetime. The Olympics in Sochi [2014] and Rio [2016] are very good, solid properties, but we have very solid properties in those timeslots with things like the Blue Jays, CHL hockey, Rogers Cup Tennis, UFC – commitments that we were going to have to pre-empt.”
Pelley said that the projected financial returns for the 2014 and 2016 Games were also a factor in the decision, although he didn’t rule out a future return to Olympic broadcasting.
“We’ve informed the International Olympic Committee that we would be very interested in looking at 2018 and 2020 when our portfolio is perhaps a little larger,” he said.
