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How We'll Be Watching The Games (Pt II)

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This year's Olympic Games covers thousands of hours of action over two weeks. It's impossible to see it all and such massive variety and the sheer breadth of content is often lost via the traditional single-channel-per-country viewing options.

This model has tended to produce either a one-eyed coverage which focusses on the country for which the broadcaster holds the media rights (in cases where the country is deemed worthy of paying enough for dedicated coverage) or some generic hold-all (in countries too poor or unimportant to be able to buy dedicated rights) that generally fails to capture much of the magic.

The Olympics, theoretically intended to bring the world closer together, often tends to emphasise the borders and the differences.

Rio 2016 may be different. This time around, digital options are challenging the traditional TV broadcast lock-up. Numerous online channels and platforms are lining up to provide a blanket coverage of everything, not just the usual national flag wavers or big names.

For sports fans like us, this presents a unique viewing experience.

No more do we need to follow the often skewed content decisions of corporate media executives. As fans we know sport is not just about winning and losing. It's about challenges and moments in time, personal connections, beauty and fun, joy and sadness.

So, we will be looking for those stories that tend to slip under the radar of the big TV networks. The losers, the almost winners, the dramas and the comic moments, the mishaps and miracles that make sport what it is.

Via the online experience, we'll be looking for a new kind of Olympic possibility. And, we'll be taking note of how the global viewing experience plays out. Will the digitisation of Olympics coverage - ironically perhaps given its ancient history - be the means by which the Olympic spirit thrives?

Perhaps now, the Games are available to the people and, again perhaps, the gung-ho nationalism that has marred the Olympic experience for many in the past may be soon a thing of the past.

We hope the world takes this opportunity to engage with each other in our common interest in sport and its human scale.
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