What’s the heck is 7048467 Canada Inc.??? It is the legal name of Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium. Sooo, for those not located north of the border, I am sure you are like, what the hell does that mean?! Well, what it means to me is simply this... the RIGHT way to cover an Olympic Games, whether domestically held or otherwise.

The consortium is a joint venture of media properties of the two biggest Canadian media players CTVglobemedia and Rogers Media. There are also some third party radio and television properties participating as well. This JV encompasses web, radio and television. The consortium is covering the Vancouver 2010 and the London 2012 Games.

We are almost a week into the 2010 games and I can say without a doubt, the coverage is amazing. When there is an event happening live, I can find coverage on television or the web with very little effort. The coverage is spearheaded on CTV and ctvolympics.ca. Coverage is primarily in English and French, but you can find coverage in Italian and Chinese if you dig a bit as well. This was great for our household during the opening ceremonies, as my wife could watch the Chinese language version and I could enjoy my English.

The coverage is in HD on all channels that your provider supplies HD versions for (and you pay for of course), so you get the biggest and clearest Olympics you have seen yet.

When I compare this to my past Olympic viewing experience in the US, this BLOWS it out of the water. The NBC handing of the games was poor (I am being polite and only using past tense). Before the consortium, when I came to visit Canada during Olympic times, the coverage was superior and most importantly to me REAL TIME. I have no problem with recaps and fluffy feel good stories, but, when an event is happening live, I DEMAND the ability to see it. I am soooo happy I was in Hong Kong and Canada for the 2008 Beijing games. It does seem that NBC is getting better offering more real time for these games since they are in the same time zones... but we’ll see in 2012 how far they have really come.

Dear 7048467 Canada Inc.,

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE keep the consortium together for every Olympic games beyond 2012.

sincerely,

me

Tags: CTV, NBC, web, olympics