Why there's no live American TV coverage of Paralympics

From The New York Times Sept. 5:

Surfeited by last month’s wall-to-wall Olympic coverage across 82 different NBC channels? Hoping that your regular “My Name is Earl” get-together won’t ever again be pre-empted by swimming and other sports?

Don’t worry. In stark contrast to almost every other large nation, the United States will continue to have no television coverage – not even one hour – during the Paralympics, which begin Saturday in Beijing. Not live, not tape-delayed. Nothing.

That being said, fans of disabled sport – not to mention sports in general – will still be able to watch more Paralympic action than ever before, thanks to streaming Internet video.

Approximately 50 hours of live event coverage will stream on universalsports.com, a portal devoted to underappreciated sports. (It starts with the opening ceremony at 8 a.m. Eastern time on Saturday; for the full schedule, see the bottom of this post.) The site will also produce hour-long highlight shows offered in the morning and evening,
with all programming subsequently available on demand.

“We want to provide a window into the world of these sports and get people excited,” said Claude Ruibal, CEO of Universal Sports, who added that General Electric and Visa are among secured sponsors. “We want to get that much more excitement in the marketplace for the future for these athletes as we get to Vancouver and London. I do think this stuff will catch on.”

As for conventional television coverage, none will be seen in the United States until Oct. 8, when NBC’s cable sports channel, Universal Sports TV, will broadcast three hours of programming for seven days. Those shows will consist of highlights and features on particularly compelling athletes.

If you insist on getting your Paralympics through rabbit ears, you have only one shot – at 2:30 Eastern on Oct. 18, when NBC will air a separate 90-minute compendium of athlete features and highlights.

This is far more coverage than the Paralympics has ever received in the United States, but it’s nothing near what other countries show of their disabled athletes. The BBC will have extensive television coverage in Britain, China’s channels are airing 10 hours each and every day, and Spain and Australia will show just a little under that. Brazil, Canada, Japan, South Africa and Germany all will have significant live or at least tape-delayed coverage during the Games.

Then again, many of the outlets in those nations are run by or affiliated with the government. NBC, as network Olympics president Gary Zenkel noted in a telephone interview Friday, has bottom lines to heed.

“We are a commercial enterprise,” Zenkel said. “They don’t have the same economic concerns and parameters that we do here in the Untied States. We are not public television. We have to get advertising revenue that exceeds its cost. It is not inexpensive to cover two weeks of athletic events in China.”

NBC figures what it does this year, both online and on television, can help it gauge the demand for more coverage for the 2010 Vancouver and 2012 London Paralympic games.

“I don’t think it has yet been proven that there’s an audience that will support live television in this marketplace,” Zenkel said. “That’s what we hope to assess over our multiplatform coverage this year.”