Where to find Paralympics broadcasts

From The Vancouver Sun in Canada, (To watch the Paralympics online, go to paralympicsport.tv).

Televised coverage of the 2010 Paralympics will be a far cry from the thousands of hours international broadcasters devoted to the recently completed Olympic Games.

Whereas hundreds of broadcasters measured their Olympic coverage in hundreds of hours - in some cases filling the airwaves 22 hours a day - just over two dozen companies are left in Vancouver for the Paralympics, and they are counting their hours here by fives, 10s and 50s. And that's the total for the entire 10 days of the Games.

But as far as the Vancouver Organizing Committee and the International Paralympic Committee are concerned, that's not necessarily a bad thing, given it's a vast improvement over past Games.

"Is it good or bad? Well, it is better than what they've had in the past. There wasn't anything for the last two [Paralympics], I think, in this country," said Terry Wright, Vanoc's executive vice-president of Games operations. "We've certainly had an improvement. I think in general broadcasters see the importance of showing something."

But there's no denying Paralympic television coverage is on a vastly different plane from the Olympics, where broadcasters spend hundreds of millions of dollars for rights in the expectation of generating multiple more millions from advertisers. At the Paralympics, broadcasters pay just $25,000 to $50,000 for territorial rights, given viewer demand is so much less.

The goal of Vanoc and the IPC is simply to have broadcasters at the Games; nobody expects to make money off them.

"To be honest, we'd like to get something," Wright said. "Anything we can get, we try to get an improvement on what they paid the time before, just to help the IPC with their long-term goal. But for us the most important thing is to try and get exposure. For all intents and purposes, we were trying to get them to give us a minimum number of hours broadcast. That was almost more important."

The disparity between the hours of coverage is significant.

The Canadian consortium led by CTV, for example, broadcast more than 2,200 hours of coverage during the Olympics, but for the Paralympics it has devoted 57 hours: 30 in French and 27 in English.

The only live broadcasts in Canada will be of sledge hockey games involving Canada, as well as the medal rounds. In B.C., live coverage will air on Rogers Sportsnet Pacific, with the exception of the March 16 Canada-Norway game (which will be live on TSN), and the gold-medal game, which CTV will broadcast live March 20.

Friday's opening ceremony won't be broadcast live, but will be repackaged Saturday afternoon into a four-hour block with a replay of the first Canada-Italy sledge hockey game.

Packaging the broadcasts that way does have some benefits. Vanoc and the International Paralympic Committee will get a large block of important Saturday viewership that will help give the Paralympics exposure, Wright said.

The numbers may be small, but they are still important.

"I think the part we focus on is that we are getting 50 hours more than the last Games," Wright said. "That's what you would call an almost astronomical percentage increase."

Overall, Paralympic broadcast rights have been sold to 10 international consortia or broadcasters. One of the consortia, the European Broadcasting Union, involves 23 companies that cover most of Europe.

Wright said most broadcasters will take daily highlights packages assembled from coverage provided by Vanoc's in-house service, Olympic Broadcast Service Vancouver.

The International Paralympic Committee expects Vancouver to generate more than the 285 hours broadcasters devoted to the 2006 Turin Paralympics, but it hasn't set a firm number of hours, according to Alexis Schaefer, the IPC's senior manager of marketing and broadcasting.

Some European broadcasters plan to cover the opening ceremony live, but most are doing tape-delayed coverage or highlights, he said.

The IPC is also significantly boosting its online coverage at paralympicsport.tv, where it will broadcast 150 hours of live and tape-delayed events. It broadcast half that amount in Turin. Live-streaming will begin with the opening ceremony.

"It is going to be a very significant portion, a very significant improvement. Of course we want to drive as many viewers as we can to the coverage," Schaefer said.

Vanoc, which took over broadcast rights from the IPC shortly after getting the Games, is paying the committee $4 million for them. It estimates the incremental cost of putting on the Paralympics over the Olympics at $88.1 million, of which $32 million is coming from the federal government. B.C. is providing $20 million.

Wright said Vanoc doesn't expect to fully recover the remaining amount, which will be paid out of its general operating budget. However, ticket sales will go some ways towards covering the deficit.

As of Monday, Vanoc had sold out a number of high-value events, including the 6,000-seat closing ceremony in Whistler, all of the Canadian sledge hockey games and the gold-medal game, as well as the gold-medal game in wheelchair curling. Many of the alpine sit-ski events have also sold out.

Caley Denton, Vanoc's vice-president of ticketing, also expects all of the roughly 40,000 tickets to Friday's opening ceremony to be gone shortly.

"We've still got a decent number of tickets, but they are going very quickly," he said. "We expect to sell out many of them."

Tickets are still available online and at the Vancouver and Whistler ticket centres, but Denton said he doesn't think Vanoc will erect its fan-to-fan ticket resale website.

A check of online resale sites shows a demand for sledge hockey tickets, but prices are not like what they were for the Olympics, with opening ceremony admissions going for less than face value.