Who is behind OBS, the much-criticized broadcaster of the Games?

2024-08-03 09:00:00

This branch of the IOC, which has held a monopoly on Olympic broadcasting since 2010, was criticized for its production of the opening ceremony. Your coverage of events is not uniform either.

Since the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games on the Seine, the production of which has been widely criticized, including by its artistic director Thomas Jolly, the company OBS (Olympic Broadcasting Services) has been in the news. Responsible for hosting the games, the subsidiary of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) no longer contracts for its coverage of events. However, we cannot say that this production company is a novice. Created in 2001, it began to work at the Beijing Games in 2008, before becoming the sole host broadcaster from the Winter Olympics in Vancouver (Canada) in 2010.

Before that, “It is the organizing committee of the Games that is responsible for organizing a group of national televisions, which is responsible for ensuring the broadcast of the events, but this is expensive”, explains Jean-Loup Chappelet, honorary professor at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) and specialist in the Olympics. The IOC then had the idea of ​​creating its own subsidiary…

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