The Kick Project

pic:digitaltrends.com 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 everyth...

Pic:Lockerdome.com A good friend of The Kick Project, Jared Genser, founder of the human rights activist group Freedom Now, alerted us to this piece he co-wrote with well-known Chinese dissident Yang Jianli, in the Wall Street Journal, on the sometimes fraught relationship between big sporting events and human rights. It's an issue that's dear to our hearts here, especially given the plight of migrant workers employed to help construct the facilities for the Qatar World Cup in 2022 (the same year as the Beijing Winter Olympics) It's Important reading. Let's hope it focusses more attention on the negative impacts of big sport in relation to human rights and social justice so as to better harness the many positive outcomes sport can generate. BEIJING OLYMPIC SCANDAL REDUX August 7, 2015 Beijing has been selected to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, making it the first city tapped to host both the Summer and Winter Games. In deciding this, the Internationa...