[MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO] Hello. Programming refers to the processes of selecting, scheduling, promoting programs, the act of choosing and scheduling programs on a broadcast station, subscribed the channel or, the web, according to Eastman and Ferguson. We need to take into account that in an advertise-supported television the primary goal is to maximize the size of and audience targeted by advertisers, according to the same authors. Before explaining in detail the criteria of structuring the schedule during the Olympics, it is necessary to tell that the media economy is an attention economy, such as the Internet economy. In other words, for the private broadcasters the great majority of the revenues come from advertising. The value of advertisements, which the advertiser has to pay to the broadcasters, is closely related with the number of viewers a television programme has. The more viewers a television programme has, the more the advertiser has to pay to the broadcaster. Therefore, television programming, is created to maintain the highest number of viewers possible during the whole day. As we have mentioned, the broadcaster receives the international signal from the Olympic Broadcasting Services and that image is complemented by the cameras and teams that the broadcasters send to the Olympics. It is necessary to make all the different programmes attractive to the audience, not only during the so-called prime time. It is crucial to attract a regular number of viewers during the whole day. During the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, the Olympics were usually programmed in only one channel. During the 1990s, the American networks NBC offered the Olympics on a pay-per-view basis, but it didn't have much success from the economic point of view. Currently a combination of free-to-air channels with pay television channels is NBC's philosophy of programming the Olympics. NBC is part of a multimedia group with different channels in the free-to-air and pay television distributed through cable and satellite. The name of the group is NBC Universal. Therefore, in this new multi-channel environment, in which several channels are used to deliver the Olympics, two aspects should be taken into account. First of all, it is essential to create an attractive programming for each one of the channels where the Olympics are programmed. Secondly, the programmers need to bear in mind the the complementarities of the programming, that this, the schedules of the different channels in which the Olympics are programmed. This is very important in order to maximize the audience in each of them and do not harm its own interests. According to Andrew Billings, a handful of sports dominated NBC's prime time Olympic coverage for the Summer Olympics: Swimming, gymnastics, track and field and diving, which usually encompasses 85% of the entire prime time telecast. A data that could be surprising is the importance that the female audience has for the Olympic television broadcasters programmers. As Billings points out, the most prominent characteristic of Olympic programming agenda setting is the focus on women viewers, which is starkly unique compared to any other sport in telecast. Women now constitute 55% of all Olympic viewers, but this trend has been very steady for decades. This fact led to create what Dick Ebersol from the NBC calls the Gymnastics/Swimming model. This model was established since the 1972 Munich Olympics and is an attractive model for the women that watch the Olympics, influenced by this trend, boxing, which was aired in prime time in 1988, was later excluded. According to Ebersol I had a very strong feeling during the Seoul Games in 1988 that every time they went to boxing in prime time, they drove the women away... when the NBC went to boxing they observed that lose two-thirds of the female adult audience in a matter of minutes. As a consequence of that they decide to deliver boxing through pay cable thematic channels where boxing aficionados could find expanded coverage without damaging the audiences in the broadcast channel, according to Billings. Sport is said to be a guarantee of success in terms of audiences. The uncertainty of the final outcome makes sport an attractive event and a jewel for the programmers. Despite this, planning is not easy. According to Ebersol, planning is a really big exercise, which usually lasts three very long days, about 14 hours a day in the Summer Games. The key production people will go through every day, first the network and prime time, the network, daytime, then the network late night, the each of one of the cables, and how we plan minute by minute, to do every one of those. Obviously, we know there is going to be change. Two types of actors have traditionally broadcast the Olympic games. First of all, there are public service broadcasters, who assure free terrestrial access to images of the Olympic Games. This has been the traditional model for the European countries, where public television operators occupy a significant place in their audiovisual systems. Secondly, there are private television operators led by the American network NBC Universal, who seek financial profitability from the investment they make when buying the rights to broadcast the Olympic Games in a country. They USA in this instance where public Service Broadcasters, PBS have traditionally played a minor role. Public television operators with public service obligation opted in many instances for simultaneous delivery of the Games on both the internet and television, using that digital television model with several generalist channels and especially sports channels. The European public television operated that best grasped already during the Beijing Olympics the notion of Internet's complimentary nature was the British Broadcasting Company, an ackknowledged point of reference for all public television operators. In recent years, the BBC chose television to broadcast sports in which the British athletes took part, and set aside the Internet for full coverage of other sports and events, playing very astutely with audiovisual convergence. With regard to the Spanish public television operator Television Española, the criteria for using one delivery medium or another were not quite clear, and some sporting events and the Opening and Closing ceremonies were broadcast simultaneously on the Internet and on several of the network's television channels. Television Española Uno, Television Española Dos and Teledeporte. For their part, private television operators like the NBC universal play with the complementary nature and the synergies created between a number of generalist channels and a specialist pay-TV channels and set aside the Internet for repeats, hours after they had been broadcast on some of the NBC channels. An example of this multichannel model was used during the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The American network used 9 different television channels to broadcast the Ceremonies and the various sporting events: NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, USA, Telemundo in Spanish, Universal HD and Oxygen, plus to new multiplex digital channels which, on occasions, offered the same programming at different times during the day. NBC broadcast 225 hours of Olympic Games' coverage in the afternoon, in the prime time slot and until the early hours of the morning, focusing mainly on gymnastics, volleyball, swimming and diving. All of these sports tend to attract to female viewers, and thus they ensured that the network had a good and sustained audience share. For their part, the other channels of the NBC group Universal concentrated on in different areas. USA specialized in broadcasting the American teams' basketball and men's and women's football, while CNBC focused on broadcasting boxing matches, Oxygen on equestrian events and repeats of gymnastics, and Telemundo and MSNBC on other minority sports. Finally, all these sports were broadcast in high definition on Universal HD 24 hours a day.
