Less than a year after packing up its NBCSN, NBC Sports is apparently calling it quits with yet another sports channel, with plans to shut down The Olympic Channel: Home of Team USA, on September 30.   

News of the shutdown was first reported by The Sports Business Journal, which said Friday that the network has begun informing cable and satellite TV distributors of its plans.  

“In order to best reach our target audiences, we are re-evaluating our programming distribution strategy regarding the content that currently airs on Olympic Channel: Home of Team USA with our partners at the IOC and USOPC,” an NBC spokesperson said in an email message. “We will be announcing our exciting new plans for Olympic content in the fall.”

The channel launched in July 2017 in 35 million homes with the U.S. Olympic Committee and the International Olympic Committee as minority partners. It first aired live Olympic matches (tennis and wrestling)  during the 2021 Tokyo Summer Games. The channel is currently in about 47 million households and lately, it has offered mostly old Olympic contests and shows from other channels. 

NBC has long been the exclusive U.S. home of the Olympic Games and in 2014 secured rights for the games through 2032.  

As cord-cutting has decimated traditional TV over the years, NBC has rethought its position regarding sports networks. It shut down NBCSN on December 31, 2021,  shifting that programming to its linear USA Network and Peacock streaming service. 

While NBC hasn't officially said where the Olympic Channel's programming will end up, it is believed it could find a home on Peacock and its other linear channels. ▪️

Multiple World Cup and Olympic gold medal-winning skier Tina Maze will be the official face of Eurosport winter sports and Olympic Games coverage as the network moves closer to the Pyeongchang Games in 2018.

Eurosport parent Discovery Communications purchased the rights last year to the Olympic Games from 2018 to 2024. Its first broadcast will be the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeonchang, South Korea.

Maze, an Olympic gold medal and World Cup champion skier joins other top winter sports athletes on the Eurosport team including triple Olympic gold medallist biathlete Michael Greis and Polish ski legend Adam Malysz. Maze had earlier announced her retirement from the sport after a 17-year career. She is set to officially bow out of competitive racing at January’s Alpine Skiing World Cup event in her home town of Maribor, Slovenia.

Maze will draw on her experience to conduct pre- and post-race interviews with athletes and provide on-the-ground tactical and strategic analysis throughout the course of the season.

“I’m thrilled to be joining the Eurosport family and am grateful to be given the opportunity to continue my career within the sport I love,” Maze said in a statement. “Nothing will replace the adrenalin rush of competing at an Olympic Games or World Cup event, but this is a new chapter in my life, one I am excited about, and I hope to give fans a different perspective of the action during competition time.”

In June 2015, Discovery Communications and the International Olympic Committee signed an agreement that will give Eurosport exclusive television and multi-platform broadcast for 50 countries and territories in Europe for the next four Olympic Games, including the Winter Olympics in Pyeonchang 2018 and Beijing 2022.

“At Eurosport, we pride ourselves on being the home of winter sports, presenting every World Cup and World Championship in every major winter discipline,” Eurosport CEO Peter Hutton said in a statement. “Adding Tina to our team of experts will give fans a first-hand insight into skiing at the very top level. “Tina is an important signing for us as we build towards the Olympic Winter Games. She is a unique character who is never afraid to share an opinion and I speak on behalf of everyone at Eurosport when I say we are all looking forward to working with her in the coming months and years.”

Kicking off with the FIS Alpine World Cup in Soelden on Oct. 22,Eurosport will broadcast more than 800 hours of live and delayed coverage between October and April with every alpine skiing, biathlon and ski jumping World Cup stage shown live or delayed on its channels. In total, 11 World Championships across all major winter sports will be covered on Eurosport this season. Eurosport will supplement action on the piste with Wintersports Extra, a magazine show broadcast every weekend and re-capping all of the best action from winter sports across the world as well as showcasing the all of the drama from the world of figure skating, curling and speed skating over the course of the next six months.

Tina Maze Career Highlights: Olympic Gold Medal, Sochi 2014, Downhill; Olympic Gold Medal, Sochi 2014, Giant Slalom; 2013 World Cup title; World Championship Gold Medal, Beaver Creek 2015, Combined; World Championship Gold Medal, Beaver Creek 2015, Downhill; World Championship Gold Medal, Schladming 2013, Super-G; World Championship Gold Medal, Garmisch 2011, Giant Slalom; Olympic Silver Medal, Vancouver 2010, Super-G; Olympic Silver Medal, Vancouver 2010, Giant Slalom; 26 World Cu

Big Data can help companies make predictions about a lot of things. How much bandwidth will I need two years from now? What are my opportunities to upsell a customer? How vulnerable is my network to an outage? Which country will win the most medals in Rio this summer?

The latter is what Gracenote is taking an informed stab at today using its trove of sports data, including performance info tabulated from thousands of events since the 2012 Summer Games, including World Championships and World Cups (or equivalent), and an Olympic database that goes back more than 100 years.

Gracenote, which launched a sports unit last year after acquiring two sports data firms last year (Infostrada Statistics B.V. and SportsDirect), revealed a “Virtual Medal Table” that predicts that Team U.S.A. will come away with 102 medals (42 gold, 29 silver and 31 bronze), beating out China’s 78 medals, Russia’s 66 and host country Brazil’s 25.

Broken down further, Gracenote’s forecast  also sees the U.S. leading the most popular events at the Summer Games -- swimming, artistic gymnastics and athletics (track and field) – expected to bring home 31 medals for athletics, 24 for swimming and 8 for gymnastics.

Among Gracenote’s predictions for individual athletes, Gracenote’s data sees Michael Phelps notching five gold medals (100m butterfly, 200m butterfly, 200m individual medley, 4x100 medley, 4x200m freestyle), and one bronze medal (4x100m freestyle), with Katie Ledecky nabbing four gold medals (200m freestyle, 400m freestyle, 800m freestyle, 4x200m freestyle).

Gracenote’s data also sees Argentina getting just two medals, which would be its worst result since Barcelona 1992. 

Gracenote’s findings arrive about 100 days before the Rio games get underway on August 5. We’ll check back at the conclusion of the global sporting event to see how they fared.

Discovery Communications has made two key appointments to its technical staff leading up to the 2018 Olympic Games in an effort to ensure that European viewers are able to watch the contests on as many screens and devices than ever before.

Discovery Networks International landed a deal last year to carry the 2018-2024 Olympic Games in Europe. On Monday, the company said it has named Dominic Baillie, chief technology officer, Olympics & Sports and Simon Farnsworth, senior vice president, Olympic Technical Distribution.

Baillie and Farnsworth will build the technical foundations necessary to ensure that every event is available to fans whenever and wherever they choose to watch it. Both men will report to Discovery chief technology officer John Honeycutt from the London Office. Farnsworth who started in March will be joined by Baillie in April, working across Discovery’s international portfolio of channels and digital products including both Eurosport and Eurosport Player.

 “Dominic is a real industry innovator; a seasoned professional with a wealth of technical expertise. Simon brings an unmatched balance of commercial and technical experience, with an impressive background in content delivery,” said Honeycutt in a statement. “Both men are global players who will push the boundaries of innovation as we continue to develop our technical operations.”

In this newly created role, Baillie will be responsible for developing the Olympic Games and sports technology strategy – including the successful delivery of the PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Games across all screens.  He also will play a leading role in the planned migration to IP, cloud for content management and distribution of the whole portfolio. With over 15 years’ experience, Baillie has held a number of senior roles in the industry including CTO at Sky News Arabia where he was responsible for engineering, development and technical operations. Prior to this he was CTO at Ten Sports.

Farnsworth will be responsible for strategic oversight of content aggregation and signal distribution, managing the transport of content from the Olympic Games venue sites to Discovery. Previously, Farnsworth held several senior positions at Globecast overmore than 10 years and most recently served as CEO of Globecast Australia, responsible for growing the revenue and profitability of the business before leading the sale and subsequent integration of the business to Telstra.

These two appointments add to the company’s Olympic Games organization team, of which three leadership positions were announced last November.

The news follows an agreement announced by Discovery Communications and the International Olympic Committee last June, which includes exclusive multimedia rights for 50 countries and territories in Europe for the 2018 through the 2024 Olympic Games. Since the agreement was announced, Discovery has made two important broadcast deals, ensuring the Olympic Games will be viewed by more people across more screens than ever before. The first of these included a sub-licensing deal with the BBC and the second was a similar deal with NOS, the Dutch broadcaster.