'Watching the Olympics on the BBC is frustrating and incomplete'

I love the Olympics. There’s nothing like waking up and stumbling into the living room, falling onto the couch and barely moving for seven hours whilst you watch athletes competing at the highest level, getting engrossed in a sport you hardly know anything about, yelling “what a jump” during the diving, only to then hear the commentators yell “they messed it up!”

But watching the Paris Olympics on the BBC has felt at times — and a warning for this upcoming joke but I honestly had no choice — like an Olympic challenge in itself. The hedonistic London 2012 days where you could watch every sporting moment simply by pressing the BBC red button are long gone. The BBC is no longer the primary rights holder, with Discovery+ or Eurosport now the only place to watch every sport live and on demand in the UK.

The BBC still has 250 hours of Olympics coverage, which means continuous sports from early morning until night. That sounds plentiful, until you learn that Discovery+ has ten times as many hours of coverage over the same period. And what is particularly painful is that the BBC is constrained to showing one broadcast linear channel and an additional iPlayer stream, so essentially only up to two different sports the time. You can really feel it when, on one typical Olympic afternoon, there can be more than ten different competitions taking place at the same time.

And with the BBC now inevitably prioritising certain athletes and Team GB medal chances, it has meant they have had to abandon certain games mid-competition, with viewers unable to watch its conclusion unless they head to Discovery+ and select the event for themselves. It particularly hurts sports that have longer competitions, such as tennis, hockey and cycling. And sports that have the potential to attract new audiences but don’t have British medal hopefuls, are less likely to be shown.

These restrictive rights are nothing new. In fact, the current Discovery+ and BBC arrangement has been in place since the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics back in 2018. It is just more noticeable now as Paris is a closer timezone than the past two Olympics were.

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But an issue I’m having is that Discovery+ is not the perfect place to watch the Olympics either. While the streamer is offering a cheap subscription over the Olympics (it’s also free for Sky subscribers), along with two television channels prioritising the most important events of the day, the linear Eurosport channels, on Discovery+, do not have the same level of main presentation, dipping you in and out of key sporting moments, as the BBC does. You’re pretty much expected to make up your own viewing plans as you go along, although the app notifies you when a gold medal is around the corner.

It can make watching some sports a rather soulless experience, defying one of the selling points of the whole Olympics in the first place: knowing that a great deal of people are being absorbed by the same sport as you at the same time.

Meanwhile, BBC has, frustratingly, continued its usual fare of studio interview segments (even interviewing guests from its own augmented reality French cafe) when some viewers, who haven’t forked out for Discovery+ and probably don’t want to scroll through endless action, just want to watch a bit more sport.

While a lot of blame for the limited coverage has been aimed at the BBC, the reality is more complicated. The International Olympic Committee (IOC), who organise these games, did a deal with Warner Bros. Discovery directly in 2015 to hold the primary broadcast rights throughout Europe at a cost of £920 million. The cost is clearly too much for the BBC to pay. The Beeb anticipated a backlash, publishing a Q&A on its website about why the coverage is the way it is: "As much as we'd like to, we can't buy everything we want."

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And it is not going to change any time soon either. A new agreement was made with Warner Bros Discovery and the European Broadcasting Union (yes, who do Eurovision) earlier this year, nothing will change for the BBC. Viewers will only be able to watch one live channel and one online stream until the Olympics 2032, the same arrangement as many other countries throughout Europe.

We’ve ended up in a paywalled viewing experience that feels frustrating and incomplete, and a BBC public service broadcasting experience that feels stifled. And with many sports now not receiving the same experience we were used to, it’s like we’re watching a sporting fixture where nobody is a winner.

The Olympics are streaming on BBC iPlayer, Discovery+ and Eurosport.

This article originally appeared on Yahoo TV UK at https://uk.news.yahoo.com/watching-olympics-uk-bbc-discovery-eurosport-142602924.html