Part 2

By: Laura Walden

Q) What kind of an increase in requests for Olympic footage have you seen at OTAB as we are approaching the Sydney Games?

A) We find that an Olympic year is more or less double the volume of usage than a non-Olympic year and a summer edition is perhaps not twice the volume but has 60-70% more demand than a winter edition.

Q) What about the period immediately following the Games in post Olympiad productions?

A) After the Games we find that we are very much more in a service capacity than a sales capacity. Because we also serve the Olympic Family on a non-commercial basis rather than commercially outside in the market place. So we do a lot of work after the Games helping the NOCs and the broadcasters that don’t get all the coverage so that they can find things that they need.

We do a lot of work with sponsors, especially TOP sponsors, who are trying to do post Games projects. But in terms of commercials the broadcasters have a hold on the material for a year before it reverts to IOC copyright and OTAB usage. So in the commercial sense it is a little flat for a year. Although we can service needs it will be at the behest of the broadcaster in that territory.

Q) How does it work that the material is available for the Olympic Family on a non-commercial basis?

A) We offer a service to the Olympic Family that is generally free, TOP sponsors, NOCs, and Olympic partner broadcasters are the key partners and generally we are there to provide them with the service and we do help lots of NOCs around the world.

We were very pleased recently that a Malaysian decathlete, who had managed to get to the same semi-final as Guy Drut in Montreal in ‘76, but subsequently came from a very impoverished background and had never seen his own performance. And nobody knew if a copy of the event existed. With the help of CBC in Canada we discovered that they were the only ones that had a copy and were then able to send one to the Malaysian NOC and he subsequently got it. That was nice, nearly 25 years later he got to see his event.

Q) Do you have any multi-sport regional games official films?

A) The TWI archive, which is the broader archive that we operate here of which OTAB is a part, includes other things and we represent many other events as well such as the PGA of America, the RNA, the opening championship of golf, the All England Club in tennis, the Nobel Foundation, the Rolex Awards, the FIS, all sorts of other bodies as well as the IOC. So we do have a lot of collections of other things and we also have a very big archive on our own since TWI has been a sports production company for 25 years.

Our archive is 50 times the material that we have in the United States in New York and Cleveland, we also have operations in Bombay and Sydney. We probably have more than 200,000 hours of material and 90% of this is sport. But we are a non-sport production company as well and deal with general historical documentaries and second world war projects too.

Q) What is your involvement in multi-sports games?

A) We represent different events like the Lahti Games, the Commonwealth Games in Manchester, and we do a lot of different games.

We have also worked with Jacques Rogge from the EOC for years on the European Youth Olympic Days. All the footage that we have taken for that is here as well. Even if we don’t own the rights or even if we don’t represent the rights, we still keep the material here. Because we are a world wide sports reporting and broadcasting agency.

For example we have shelves of NFL and naturally baseball and others because we have been working with them for years. Because we are known as an archive and a trustworthy production company we are allowed to store their footage and pay a fee as we use clips.

So we are a repository, like most major broadcasters are, a repository of not just their own material and represented material but a whole range of other material as well.

Q) How do you feel about webcasting?

A) The issue about putting things on the web is that people are sensitive to what then will happen to them afterward. At the moment it is not really a major issue because the quality is so appalling. Although I get shot for saying so, because there are lots of people that believe and know its the future and are very dismissive of my conservatism.

But as far as I am concerned watching sporting images on the web at the moment is like watching paint dry. People who are in computers today get excited about the little box on the computer screen. But I am not stupid enough not to realize that within ‘X’ years that will be different and that watching it on their computer screen will be like watching it now on television and then the world will really be transformed.

On the other hand, if the Olympic Games cost ‘X’ billion to put on and one of the only ways to pay for it is the television rights then the last thing you want to do is let the images out without making sure that you are compensated for it and that is a major issue.

I know a lot of people working on a very simple issue but technically very complicated to achieve, which is how you throw a ring fence around web images on a national basis. Because at the minute by definition it’s global, and all television rights at the moment are sold generally territory by territory. You can buy world rights but generally it is broken down into territories.

If in the future once its out there its out there worldwide, how do you do that? And there are all sorts of ways that people are trying to make sure that for example in the future you will need to have your smart card or your access code to see Olympic images or the Super bowl on you TV in order to guarantee that somebody is getting paid. How do you make sure that someone is not pirated or worked around?

Of course the problem is that with the electronics industry the minute that somebody builds up a protection then some other smart guy works out a way to get around it, as we’ve seen with hacking.

You know because even the hackers seem to beat the banking guys, and even the computer software guys and even Microsoft. So one can understand why even the broadcasters and the rights holders and others are very, very conservative about images.

Q) Well do you think that they are going to eventually put the Games on the internet?

A) I don’t know, I think that it will be a different question in the future. A new form of broadcasting is happening right now which is that we are at the beginnings of what is called convergence. And what that will mean ultimately is that the term internet may, or may not, but I suspect may disappear in the sense that it will just become the dominant form of broadcasting. In other words, I suspect that images will still be carried over the air by electronic wires, whether that is cable or telephone or fibre optics or whatever. But the method, whether it is called internet or satellite will become somewhat irrelevant because the key to it is, at the business end or at the viewer end there won’t be a differentiation between a television and a computer.

I think it will merge that the television will be a computer and vice-versa and therefore, to the audience it will be just like it is now and the image will appear in your sitting room. Then it doesn’t matter what it is called, I am sure that this will happen. Whether that means that the Olympics will be on the internet, I suppose it will, well it will just be like another channel.

I think all broadcasting will be on the internet, because it will all merge. What’s more interesting is that televisions will change and will become portable as they kind of are already and interactive. And if you are saying that interactive television is an internet then fine, or if you are saying that a computer that is as good as a television, then that’s how you deal with the semantics. But I think the semantics are irrelevant because they are just the names of the currently competing organizations. By saying that the broadcaster will win or the computer or software guys, that is just posturing imposition. I think that technology, like it has it all areas of life, will win and everything else will brand themselves and name themselves in whatever way that is more acceptable for the audience.

I think there is a psychological sealing to the word internet which is about 30-40% of the population, because the majority of the population do not want to use a keyboard for leisure or for watching television. The people who currently use keyboards all day in their offices and sometimes in their homes are a group of people who are less than 50% who enjoy that kind of thing. Most people want to sit in an armchair and watch the telly, they will use a remote. But then of course what will eventually happen is that the computer and the keyboard will become a remote and people won’t call it the internet.

Q) What are you going to be doing in Sydney?

A) We have a broad relationship with the IOC, it is not just the OTAB relationship, we have been making historical films and documentaries about the IOC just as ordinary program makers. But we also do films with the IOC and one of our responsibilities as OTAB is to market not just the clip sales but also the finished product as well. So we work with the IOC to produce the Olympic Series which is packaged programming. Not archived clip sales but packaged programming, all the films are available as complete films for example in this series. We also have the main body of the Olympic Series which is histories, golden moments, vignettes, special stories of African Americans, stories of women, stories of individual sports and these we make and market for the IOC.

We also do commissioned work for the IOC, we’ve done service announcements for them end various promotional films and packages with them and every Games we work with the Marketing Department, with Michael Payne’s team, to do a project called the ‘Camera of Record’, which is a developing concept.

It started in Lillehammer and is now developing towards Sydney as an evolving animal but effectively, the IOC wisely has tried to reflect on some key elements of the Olympic experience that the broadcasters either don’t have time or nor the possibility to try to achieve. Broadcasters are effectively sports event live broadcasters.

Manolo Romero who runs this wonderful consortium, creates the best sporting images in the world, which is what they are there to do. There is a huge other part of the Olympic experience which is obviously the time, the place, the setting, the ambience, and although a lot of that is contained in the Olympic Broadcast Package, because they are very highly skilled broadcasters, the IOC took the decision that it would try and reflect on some of the key elements of that particular Olympic experience using a single camera.

Some of it is quite easy to break down, but obviously one of the things we have to do is to reflect on the work of the Olympic Broadcasters. So we go and film them and the new cameras and the skycams and the tracking cams, we go behind the scenes and film the central control of IBC which is fascinating. We just film the daily work of broadcasters we reflect on sponsor activity what they are doing and what their contribution is which is very important. We reflect on the athletes’ experience the athletes’ village, the place, whether it be Lillehammer or Nagano, to try to put it into it’s cultural or historical setting. When we were in Atlanta we went around Georgia and the city to capture the memories of the place.

The IOC, was any way, but certainly in the light of the recent controversies that it has been involved in, trying very hard to reinforce not only the Olympic message but the Olympic ideal what the Olympics stand for in a positive and constructive way.

And part of our responsibility is to try and show what a positive experience the Olympic Games are for everyone for the athletes, the spectators, the host country, and try to recreate the magic. Now that is a very ambitious and arrogant thing to try to accomplish with a single camera. But there are certain images that one can imagine will excite and inspire an audience, and those are the things we try to find and capture. And it is very, very enlightened brief for any governing body to attempt to do.

Q) How does that get put together into a package?

A) Two things happen to it, First of all the film goes into OTAB for heritage, so it is always there. This is very wise of the IOC, and also all the Torch film always goes into OTAB to be kept for the future. And I should stress that all the original heritage copies of everything we’ve talked about goes into the Olympic Museum in Lausanne. We only keep a commercial copy here, that is why you need two copies in two different places. We are not the holders of the heritage here, the holder is the Olympic Museum.

So therefore they get the original film and the first copy and we get the copy to commercially exploit and to make into productions. For example the BBC did a major sort of investigative documentary in Atlanta where they asked to do behind the scenes film and it was granted by the IOC but one of the conditions was that the rushes came into the heritage. Which is very wise. So after the BBC had finished with it the material came to the IOC, and that goes in for the future. And you can imagine how valuable this would be to film historians and anyone in two or three generations time, to be able to look back on that.

And the same with the ‘Camera of Record’ so it has a heritage purpose. But also the IOC post games then uses the ‘Camera of Record’ for various purposes, one is for example, to show sponsors what their contribution has been we have put compilations together for NOCs in the past to intercut the experience with the performance of their athletes. Because the performance of their athletes is available from the broadcast operation but very often they need some of the images from the city and the Village, the Opening ceremony etc. The Opening Ceremony has to go live and has to jump around sometimes we can do something different.

One of the other areas that is developing is to use the ‘Camera of Record’ to show future organizing committees key things. We can show them the venues, the IBC, and how to best capture Olympic imagery and how to promote the Olympic ideals, and the Olympic look of the Games. Because imagery now is so important, there is something intangibly significant about the atmosphere of creating an Olympic venue, the fact that there is no advertising, the fact that the rings have this sort of semiotic significance for people. It evokes thoughts and feelings and each organizing committee has to be very careful that the look of the Games that it is a positive look. That it reflects the higher ideals of the Olympics, not for example, commercial ideals. One of the huge wisdoms of the Olympic event is that there is no commercial advertising in the Olympic venues because it helps create the sense that the Games themselves are different. The same because they are about sport and competition but they are different in that they have higher ideals.

Q) How do you think Sydney is going to be, will it project this image?

A) Everyone has very high hopes that Sydney will be a reaffirmation of the Olympic tradition in the aftermath of the traumas that the Olympic Movement and particularly the IOC went through recently. Everybody knows that the venues are outstanding, I was in Homebush at the turn of the year and they were spectacular then and I have heard that all the add-ons and the atmosphere is already looking fantastic.

Australia is a great place to go to, Sydney is wonderful, the IOC has put the reforms in place, the athletes are ready. The most important people are ready, the athletes. And the hope is that like Barcelona and Lillehammer were, is that we can have a special experience and remind us of all the good that the Olympic Games can do in terms of making people feel that the whole world has positive and wholesome things about it in and amongst all the problems that we have.

Which is what the Olympic experience in my view is all about, it reminds us of our common humanity, of our specialness and our humbleness, at the same time.

When people win it makes us feel good because we think we can achieve something special. When people loose it reminds us that we are only mortal and that most of the time we can’t achieve what we want to achieve. That is all part of it, and hopefully as they’ve done for generations, people will laugh and smile and feel good and cry, that is what they are looking forward to.

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