NBC/Comcast wins rights to next four Olympic Games

NBC/Comcast has won the U.S. rights for the next four Olympic Games.

The media conglom paid $4.38 billion to televise the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, and the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro, as well as the 2018 and 2020 Games, for which the sites have not been selected.

NBC has broadcast the Summer Olympics since 1988 and the Winter Games since 2002.

NBC/Comcast outbid Fox Sports and ESPN — a division of Disney, which also owns ABC. All three companies had submitted sealed envelopes into a see-through plexiglass box, then left the building to let International Olympic Committee officials open them and consider the offers in private. That according to the Associated Press, reporting from Lausanne, Switzerland.

The IOC received “three excellent bids,” but in the end decided to go with its “long-standing partner NBC,” committee President Jacques Rogge said Tuesday. Rogge said that NBC “has a track record for broadcasting the Games that speaks for itself” and that the network had a “clear and innovative” idea for how to grow that coverage.

In its pitch, NBC said that it would offer live coverage of every event on one of the NBC/Comcast platforms and that its broadcast network would continue its tradition of tape-delayed Games play — laced with those (treacly) human-interest stories that viewers lap up.

ESPN offered “best wishes to Comcast/NBC” on securing exclusive U.S. rights to the Games. On the other hand, ESPN also said, as if it meant it to sting, that its own “compelling” offer had “included the enthusiastic participation of all the Walt Disney Company’s considerable assets.”

“We made a disciplined bid that would have brought tremendous value to the Olympics and would have been profitable for our company,” ESPN said Tuesday in its concession statement. “To go any further would not have made good business sense for us.”

Fox Sports Media Group Chairman David Hill also had things he wanted to get off his chest. He congratulated NBC/Comcast but added that Fox Sports’s bid would have provided “the largest marketing platform ever and an economic package we believed to be good for the IOC and [Fox parent company] News Corp.”

The announcement comes less than three weeks after Dick Ebersol — the charismatic NBC suit who has been the face of Olympics coverage in this country for a couple of decades — resigned abruptly when his contract-renewal talks collapsed.

(Ebersol’s the guy to thank/blame for all those human interest stories that litter Olympics coverage.)

NBC previously skunked ESPN and Fox in 2003, when it coughed up more than $2 billion for U.S. rights to the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, B.C., and the 2012 Summer Games in London.

On the other hand, NBC lost more than $200 million on the Vancouver Games.

Ebersol was to have been part of the NBC/Comcast entourage in Lausanne, pitching the IOC on the U.S. TV rights to the next round of Olympic Games. Ebersol was replaced by Mark Lazarus, the new chairman of NBC Sports Group, who had this to say Tuesday:

“It is a great thrill to know that NBC’s unsurpassed Olympics heritage and unprecedented partnership with the IOC will continue through 2020.”