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IMPROVE THE
EXPERIENCE OF THE GAMES
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The IOC has long recognised that its actions to improve
the quality of the Games must be coupled with efforts to
improve the experience of the Games for all who view them
or are involved. The challenge for the IOC and Games
organisers is to understand, and then exceed, the
expectations of all participants. The IOC encouraged
organisers and other Olympic Movement members involved
in Games preparation to think like the “clients” they served in
order to devise programmes that would deliver an optimal
Games experience:
Athletes. More than 10,500 athletes in Beijing and 2,500
in Turin competed in venues designed to exacting
International Federation (IF) standards and further
benefitted from state-of-the-art accommodations and
scoring systems.
Spectators. Up to 18,000 volunteers in Turin and 70,000
in Beijing were trained to help Olympic visitors during
their time in the host cities. In Turin, spectators were able
to extend their Olympic experiences by attending
Games-related cultural events such as evening concerts
in the medals plaza. In Beijing, spectators took advantage
of the 2008 Cultural Olympiad, which included the last
stop of a one-year tour of the One World, One Dream
IOC Olympic Treasure Exhibition. This travelling exhibition,
the largest mobile exhibition ever mounted by the Olympic
Museum, attracted an estimated 2 million people in the
fifteen cities to which it travelled in the lead-up to the
Games. Also in Beijing, more than 100,000 visitors
attended Olympexpo, the largest exhibition of pins,
stamps, coins, memorabilia and art objects related to
the Olympic Games ever staged. The event was jointly
sponsored by the IOC, BOCOG, the Chinese Olympic
Committee (COC) and China Post Group.
THE BEIJING 2008 OLYMPIC GAMES WERE
THE MOST WATCHED GAMES IN OLYMPIC
HISTORY, WITH A POTENTIAL GLOBAL
REACH OF 4.3 BILLION PEOPLE.
Broadcasters. The fundamental IOC broadcast policy, as
set forth in the Olympic Charter, is to ensure the widest
possible audience for the Olympic Games. Olympic
broadcast partnerships during the 2005–2008 period
achieved that goal.
The Turin Olympic Broadcast Organisation provided
nearly 1,000 hours of live content of the 2006 Games.
In turn, the IOC’s broadcast partners were able to make
an unprecedented amount of footage available to viewers
in their territories. More than 16,000 hours of broadcast
coverage of the 2006 Winter Games were available to
television viewers, the most of any Olympic Winter
Games. In addition, the Olympic broadcasters made
greater use of satellite and digital platforms to provide
billions of viewers with increased access to the Games.
In fact, broadcast coverage of Torino 2006 marked a 57
percent increase over the previous record of 10,416
hours of coverage established for the Games in Salt
Lake City in 2002.
Beijing 2008 saw the Olympic Games – and Olympic
broadcasting – come of age, as superb sporting action
was delivered to the world via television, the internet and
mobile phones, offering fans unprecedented choice of
when and where to watch the Games. Beijing Olympic
Broadcasting Company, a joint venture of Olympic
Broadcasting Services and BOCOG, provided more than
5,000 hours of high definition sporting competitions to
the rights-holding broadcast partners. Coverage for the
2008 Olympic Games—the first Games covered entirely
in high definition—exceeded 61,700 hours globally,
making it the largest broadcast event in history.
Digital media coverage of the Beijing Games was also
freely available, making the 2008 Olympic Games the first
truly digital Games. Fans were able to access live action
and highlight videos streamed to their mobile phones, live
video streams via the Internet through dedicated sites
and television coverage in High Definition Television
(HDTV). In addition to the activities of its rights-holding
broadcast partners, the IOC launched its own internet
channel, "Beijing 2008", available on the YouTube
platform, to broadcast video highlights from the Games
to those territories where digital video-on-demand rights
had not been sold.
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