By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
SBS has the exclusive rights to broadcast the Vancouver Winter Olympics here, but it appears viewers are wishing they had other options as frustration grows over the television station's Olympic coverage or lack thereof.
With the Winter Games kicking off during the Lunar New Year's holidays, SBS had sought to exploit its Olympic broadcasts to dominate the fight for living-room eyeballs.
However, judging by the comments on the SBS Web site and Internet discussion boards, many viewers find themselves disappointed by the network's weak commitment to live competition and breadth of coverage.
Nonetheless, SBS still seems to be getting the ratings jolt it had hoped for. According to a measurement by AGB Nielsen Media Research, SBS drew a rating of 23.6 percent for Sunday's broadcast of the men's 1,500-meter short-track speed-skating finals, in which South Korea's Lee Jung-su ended up winning the gold.
And any event involving figure skating starlet Kim Yu-na, who draws comparisons with Michelle Kwan for her ability on the ice and Anna Kournikova for her ability to generate Internet traffic, would probably shatter television ratings records.
However, short-track speed-skating, a competition that heavily involves South Koreans, was one of the few events that SBS bothered to cover.
The television station's afternoon programming for Monday, the last day of the Lunar New Year's holidays, was filled with reruns of game shows and comedy programs such as ``Family Outing'' and ``Star King,'' while the Winter Games were mentioned only during 10-minute news reports in between.
SBS did offer more Olympic coverage later in the evening, but spent a chunk of that time recapping Lee's gold-medal performance and Lee Seung-hoon's surprise silver in the men's 5,000-meter speed-skating finals, rather than focusing on fresher events or new developments.
The width of coverage is frustrating for sports fans, especially when the other national television networks, KBS and MBC, are limiting their Olympic coverage to highlight clips on their afternoon and evening news programs.
``It seems evident that SBS's sole coverage of the Vancouver Olympic Games has reduced the overall interest in the Olympics by viewers, as the television station seems reluctant to expand its Olympic minutes at the expense of cheap comedy and celebrity gossip,'' wrote a blogger on a Daum (www.daum.net) message board.
Another Internet user on Naver (www.naver.com) quipped, ``We won't be getting any serious Olympic coverage until SBS starts the inevitable Kim Yu-na minute-by-minute updates.''
Granted, much of the action in Vancouver takes place when the majority of South Koreans are fast asleep, but viewers still insist that SBS should be more creative in generating a larger Olympic buzz, rather than just relying on the obligatory broadcasts around 1 a.m. to 5 a.m.
Ahead of the Winter Games, SBS had promised to provide 200 hours of Olympic coverage on its terrestrial channel, which roughly breaks down to 12 hours a day, and 330 hours on its cable channels, including SBS Sports.
An SBS official defended the company's programming schedule, claiming that the viewer complaints were based more on emotional reactions than facts.
``Viewers are quick to forget that there is a 17-hour time difference between Vancouver and Seoul, which means that Koreans will have to stay up from midnight to morning to watch some of the events live. We are still providing a good level of coverage, but we don't have to sacrifice our primetime programs in doing so,'' he said.
SBS became the first Korean broadcaster to provide exclusive coverage of an Olympic event, after the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) failed to settle a dispute between SBS and its rival broadcasters, KBS and MBC, which had demanded that SBS resells its broadcasting rights.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) awarded SBS the broadcasting rights for the Olympic Games through 2016 following a bidding process in 2006.
This caught KBS and MBC off guard, as the three major terrestrial broadcasters had previously agreed to an alliance and a bid of $63 million. SBS, which decided to break off at the last minute, landed the deal after bidding $72.5 million, much to the dismay of its rivals.
SBS also owns the exclusive broadcasting rights to the FIFA World Cup football tournaments through 2014.