New Zealand's Olympic flag. Image via Wikipedia Commons
It has been predicted to be New Zealand's best Olympics ever. In April, Gracenote, a Holland-based sports database website predicted New Zealand would win 11 gold in Rio, and 23 medals in total. That outcome would place New Zealand ninth on the overall Rio medal table; making it the best Kiwi Olympics ever, beating the eight golds at the 1984 Los Angeles Games.But when the finest athletes New Zealand has to offer compete for gold in Rio de Janeiro next month, there'll be almost no Kiwi reporters there to cover their success.Yesterday, Fairfax NZ and NZME—New Zealand's biggest two media companies—walked away from negotiations with Sky Television to use video footage of competition from Rio. The talks had reportedly dragged on for months.Both companies claim the restrictions that Sky Television—who hold the Games' broadcast rights in New Zealand—had placed on footage use would significantly impact the way the Games would be covered.As a result, they withdrew the accreditations of all the staff they were planning to send to Rio, including reporters, photographers and videographers. Fairfax NZ and NZME, who run the NZ Herald, run all but one of the major daily and weekly newspapers in New Zealand—as well as its two biggest news websites, stuff.co.nz and nzherald.co.nz."The NZOC has effectively washed its hands of any part in this," Boucher said, in a letter to the NZOC."In our view, it is unacceptable that a broadcast rights holder should have been given so much power to control how its competitor media organisations get to report on an event of such national and international significance."For their part, Sky Television say they believed their terms were fair."Sky stands by its news access rules that they're the most generous in the whole world and have been acceptable worldwide, but apparently they're not acceptable to our news agencies in New Zealand," spokesperson Kirsty Way said.The IOC agrees with Sky Television."It is certainly a very disappointing situation and a hard one to understand from here, especially understanding that Sky's proposal offers more to New Zealand media organisations in terms of cross-platform digital access than any other country in the world, including Australia," Anthony Edgar, the IOC's head of media operations, told the National Business Review.
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Shayne Currie, NZME's managing editor, complained that Sky Television's deal did not offer fair use of copyright material under the New Zealand Copyright Act.Sinead Boucher, Fairfax's group executive editor, has criticized the IOC and NZOC for failing to help resolve the footage standoff.The NZOC's charter states that Olympic coverage must be made available to the widest possible audience. The majority of New Zealand has access to Fairfax or NZME publications or websites, while less than one million Kiwis have Sky Television subscriptions.Questions NZH/Fairfax might be wary of getting answers to: will the public care they aren't at the Olympics? Will it lessen their games joy?
— Jim Kayes (@JimKayes)July 21, 2016
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Both NZME and Fairfax—who are currently attempting to merge—plan to cover the Games from New Zealand. Suffice to say, the quality of the coverage and ability to break important stories will be a massive step down from having staff on the ground in Rio. TVNZ and TV3 will have reporters in Rio, but many of New Zealand's best sportswriters will have to watch from afar.Clearly, the New Zealand sporting public are badly hurt from this. Most public sympathy on social media has been with NZME and Fairfax over the last day, with some suggesting saving money from being in Rio is a positive.Moving ahead, the Kiwi sports media environment could become more heated than the competitions they cover.Not covering the Olympics will save money at Fairfax/NZME and reduce the TV-subscription selling hype. Not all bad…
— Bill Bennett (@billbennettnz)July 21, 2016