If you live in the United States or have access to the Golf Channel or Peacock then you’ll have had your eyes glued to the Olympic golf competition, however if you’re watching in the UK you may have wondered why it’s not really been on terrestrial TV as yet.
Well, it’s not because the BBC just don’t fancy it but because they’re now restricted in what they can show live – as many don’t realise that as of the last Olympics in Tokyo the British national broadcaster doesn’t have the full rights to Olympic coverage in the UK.
That’s because in 2015, Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD) secured a €1.3bn deal for the rights to show the Olympic Games in Europe.
That means across Eurosport on TV and Discovery+ streaming the broadcaster can show as much Olympic coverage from as many events as they want – something the BBC did at London 2012 and Rio 2016.
Thanks to UK law meaning the Olympics must be shown on free TV of some sort, the BBC have managed to do a deal with WBD to show plenty of action – over 250 hours of it in fact – from Paris.
It does mean, though, that the BBC can only show two events live at one time, and with the focus on medal events and so much going on, the early rounds of the Olympic golf have obviously been left out.
There’s still plenty of TV updates and when the medals are decided no doubt it’ll be shown live, but if you’re wanting a full fix of live golf in the UK then a Discovery+ subscription is what you’ll need.
The BBC explained the decision not to rival the WBD deal for the entire Olympics rights package as wanting to ensure they’re not spending too much of licence fee money.
“We take decisions over our spending very seriously as it is licence fee payers’ money that we are using,” read the BBC Sport website when announcing the deal.
“As much as we’d like to, we can’t buy everything we want.”
You can, of course, follow all the Olympic golf action with our live text updates and live leaderboard right here on Golf Monthly.
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