Digital age bringing television to 3.9b potential viewers

By PETER JESSUP

SYDNEY - Sydney television steps into the digital age well and truly at the Games, with a variety of new camera angles and options available as a result of new, smaller technology.

There will be rails beside the athletics track and up the rowing course and flying cameras on wires at a variety of other venues to give a new perspective. The kayak slalom has them placed at water level, right on the hazards.

Altogether, the host broadcaster, Sobo, will have 940 cameras in action, 100 of them in the main venue, Stadium Australia, alone.

Out the back, the Easter Show pavilion is converted to a huge broadcast edit centre where pictures are cut and edited to suit the variety required by the 200 home markets. A total of 402 monitors are crewed to do that work out of 35 studios, with the results beamed off continuously by 15 satellite dishes.

There are nearly 15,000 broadcast staff, technicians and television front-people here to report on 10,500 athletes.

Sobo will film 3400 hours of competition in total, which would take 144 days to put to air if you bought all of it.

Canada has bought most time, 1039 hours. South Africa and Korea tie for second with 930. China has 750.

The Games organisers claim that of the 3.9 billion people on the planet who have access to a TV, 3.7 billion will watch some of the Games. Sobo is prepared for an audience peak of 4 billion for events like the men's 100m. No rights have been sold to pay-television broadcasters, as the IOC charter requires the Games to be available to all, free of charge.

Here, as in New Zealand, one channel has rights and broadcast access. TVNZ's deal denies TV3 rights to screen pictures of any event until 24 hours after they have.

In Sydney, Channel Ten has decided it cannot compete and will flash messages on screen to tell when Ian Thorpe is in the pool for the start of the 200m or Cathy Freeman in the start blocks.

They have planned up to 10 breaks up to seven minutes long where they see medal victories and hope viewers will reward them for the warning by switching back once the action finishes.

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