Rio Olympics fail to attract viewers
By Kim Rahn
The Rio Olympics are one of the world’s most eye-catching ongoing events, but here in Korea not many people are tuning in on TV.
The main reason may be the big time difference between Korea and Brazil — 12 hours. Most of the games are held at night or in early morning, forcing people to give up cheering for the Korean teams live.
According to a survey of 541 office workers by Job Korea, a job search portal, Wednesday, 98.1 percent of them said they were aware that the Olympics are ongoing. But when asked whether they would watch events at night or in the early morning, 58.2 percent said “no.”
Regarding the reason with multiple replies allowed, 65.7 percent said they don’t watch the games because watching TV late at night would interfere with work the next day, and 32.4 percent said because they can watch reruns later in the daytime, while 30 percent said they were not interested in the Olympics.
“If it would have been in Europe and the games would start in the early evening, I may have begun watching in the evening and up to 1 or 2 a.m.,” said an office worker, surnamed Park. “But many games in Rio are held from midnight to 6 a.m., and I just canstay up during those hours because I would doze off at work.”
Against this backdrop, Korean broadcasters find it difficult to profit through commercials by taking advantage of the Rio Games.
While advertisers prefer time slots between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m., most events are broadcast between midnight and 8 a.m., the slots with the lowest prices.
According to industry sources, each of the three terrestrial broadcasting companies has earned about 6 billion won ($5.4 million) through ad sales, which is equivalent to about 30 percent of the profits they made in the 2012 London Olympics.
The three companies — KBS, MBC and SBS — are supposed to pay a combined 44 billion won in broadcasting rights fees to the International Olympic Committee.
With the small ad sales and huge fees, the Korea Broadcast Advertising Corp. expects KBS to record a deficit of 12.5 billion won, MBC 4.4 billion won, and SBS 9.4 billion won, for broadcasting Olympic events.