Televising the Olympics 

FROM: JAN-FEB 2010 ISSUE | BY JEFF BUCKSTEIN

As the 2010 Winter Olympic Games take centre stage in Vancouver for 17 days in February, a huge Canadian audience is expected to tune in for unprecedented coverage provided by Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium (COBMC), a partnership between CTV Inc. and Rogers Media Inc.

One of the key people keeping an eye on the books and ledgers of COBMC, to ensure they are in order during one of the biggest worldwide sporting extravaganzas ever, will be the Consortium’s finance manager Neil O’Brien, CGA, who relishes his brush with sporting history.

“The greatest opportunity working with CTV is to be able to say I was part of bringing the Olympic Games to the Canadian audience like never before,” O’Brien says. The build up to these Games has provided its fair share of personal excitement for the 47-year-old Toronto native.

“One of my greatest experiences so far was meeting and working with Brian Williams, who is host of Olympic Prime Time and will be co-host of the opening and closing ceremonies at Vancouver 2010. He has been a commentator for the Olympic Games since the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal,” O’Brien notes.

“We have also had visits from past Olympic athletes, including Catriona Le May Doan, Jamie Salé, and David Pelletier,” O’Brien adds, noting than even prominent individuals from other venues are showing interest. For instance, “this past summer (former CFL star) Michael ‘Pinball’ Clemons stopped by,” he recalls.

Becoming a professional accountant was actually a second career for O’Brien. After completing high school in 1980, he pursued his original career goal of becoming a carpenter, successfully apprenticing and earning a journeyman-ship in carpentry. O’Brien parlayed that expertise into becoming an entrepreneur and running his own renovation business between 1988 and 1992.

However, when the construction industry in Ontario hit hard times during the early 1990s, O’Brien, decided to change track and become an accountant. He became a banking clerk for Scott’s Food Services in Markham in 1992; leaving two years later to become an accounts receivable clerk with Grenville Printing in North York.

O’Brien earned an accounting diploma from Centennial College in Scarborough in 1996 after five years of part-time studies while working full time.

“I chose CGA in 1996 after talking with colleagues and friends who spoke highly of the program. For me, CGA provided the most comprehensive education available in accounting. It also gave me the most flexibility in terms of studying part time and still maintaining a full-time job,” O’Brien explains.

In 1997, he left Grenville to join Messier-Dowty Aerospace in Ajax as a financial analyst. “I spent over seven years there preparing financial statements, analyzing costs, tracking fixed assets, and other ad hoc projects.  That job also gave me the opportunity to travel to Paris and London,” he recalls.

O’Brien moved to Loyalty Management Group, the group responsible for the Air Miles Reward Program, as a senior financial analyst in 2004. “My main focus was to track costs and prepare budgets specifically for IT,” he says.

In 2006, O’Brien earned his designation and accepted a contract with CIBC in Toronto as a senior financial analyst.

Two years later he became the reconciliations manager with Bell Canada in Mississauga. O’Brien wasn’t long at Bell however, before his current opportunity arose with the COBMC, based in CTV’s offices.

“I was contacted by a recruiter and I felt that CTV would be an exciting place to work, especially as finance manager on the Olympic project,” he says. O’Brien assumed his duties in November 2008.

O’Brien’s major responsibilities with the Consortium involve “tracking and controlling costs for the many pre-Olympic productions and liaising with producers and directors about the costs of their respective productions,” he says.

“My greatest challenge in this position has been communicating financial requirements to non-financial managers. Many of these managers are used to producing films, but within a corporate structure they are also required to control costs, generate budgets, and approve invoices,” O’Brien adds.

CTV and Rogers paid $90 million US to secure the broadcasting rights to the 2010 Winter Olympics, a more than three-fold increase over the approximately $28 million US that the CBC paid to obtain rights to the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy.

“Broadcasters typically pay more for rights to Games held in their home country because audiences tend to be much higher given the local relevance,” explains Pamela Mollica, the COBMC’s Toronto-based senior communications manager. “Broadcasters outside of the host country who are located in the same time zone also often find the broadcast rights more valuable than other countries, because events are held during prime-time viewing hours for their audiences,” she adds.

The broadcast rights fees for both Winter and Summer Olympic Games have increased significantly over time.

One reason is that rights now include coverage across multiple media platforms, such as online and mobile, that were not available during past Olympics. “As a result, broadcasters are able to offer more complete and integrated sponsorship packages to advertisers,” says Mollica.

For example, when the 2010 Winter Games begin, COBMC will provide “unprecedented coverage and consumer choice in English, French, and multi-languages on multiple platforms. In addition to television, radio, online, and print, fans will also be able to access Vancouver 2010 coverage on their mobile devices thanks to a recently announced partnership with Bell,” Mollica notes.

Especially with the Games being held on Canadian soil, “we are confident there will be a significant demand for coverage across all of our platforms,” consisting of 4,500 hours of coverage via 10 television networks, 10 radio stations, two websites, and a national print publication, she adds.

Another key broadcast organization is Olympic Broadcasting Services S.A. headquartered in Madrid, Spain. They open offices in host cities several years ahead of Olympic events, and their subsidiary for the 2010 Winter Games is Olympic Broadcasting Services Vancouver (OBSV), which was created in December 2006.

Nancy Lee, OBSV’s chief operating officer, is a former executive and reporter with CBC sports, who has viewed all Winter Olympics in a professional capacity since the 1988 Games in Calgary. She notes that the OBSV has three major functions, including:

• Producing coverage of all sporting events and medal ceremonies at the 2010 Winter Games, as well as the opening (February 12) and closing (February 28) ceremonies;
• Arranging unilateral facilities for international broadcast rights holders and setting up and facilitating transmission of the feed from sporting events to the broadcast centres, then back to host countries; and
• Carrying out all of the construction required to create a temporary 24-hour a day, seven-day a week broadcast facility that will be the largest in the world during the Games.

Two international broadcast centres are being built by OBSV – one at the convention centre in downtown Vancouver and another at the convention centre in Whistler, B.C. Construction took place between August and December 2009; the completed facilities will accommodate about 7,200 broadcasters and support people from around the world.

At its peak, OBSV will employ 2,400 people; more than 90 per cent of those (producers, directors, camera people, graphics, etc.) will work for about a three week period in February 2010. A core group of 120 have been together for most of the planning stages carried out over the past three years.

OBSV has prepared facilities to cover every sports venue. “We need to get equipment delivered to some pretty difficult places up in the mountains. When viewers see a picture of the grandstands – say for Alpine or Nordic skiing, they’ll see mini-trailers. That’s where the play-by-play people are. It’s a long haul up to get cameras and furniture and television sets there, but that’s what we do,” Lee emphasizes.

There will also be many technical things happening behind the scenes. When Alpine skiers race down the hill, for example, viewers will see a ghost image of the leader beside the actual skier, so they can determine how the current competitor is doing in relation to the leader’s time. In Nordic ski jumping, there will be a graphic line indicating the spot to beat, she explains.

Much of the broadcast preparation work must be done several years ahead of time, says Lee. “There’s about a four-year cycle of planning prior to the event. A year and half in advance, the rights holders have to indicate how much space they need at the broadcast centre. Then we have to fit it all together like a jigsaw puzzle.”

Also during that period, “the rights holders are essentially committing their budgets to the amount of construction we call ‘fit-out.’ When you bid on any sports property, part of your bidding involves how much you’re going to spend on your production and what your revenue model might be,” adds Lee.

Having to prepare so far in advance also means that changing economic conditions can be a wild card.

Three years ago when OBSV started planning for the 2010 Games, the construction industry was plagued by labour shortages, and there were worries about getting everything done on time.

“When we started construction in August 2009, the marketplace had changed dramatically and we’re clearly on time to get it all done.”

[ TOP ]