Business Notes Broadcasting

The Olympic Games can be almost as important to broadcasters as they are to athletes. The network that carries the Games can usually count on huge worldwide audiences and hundreds of millions of advertising dollars. As an added bonus, viewers tend to go on watching the network's shows for months after the competition ends. Last week the International Olympic Committee announced that NBC had won the rights to the 1988 Games in South Korea by agreeing to pay the Seoul Olympic Committee at least $300 million. If the Games generate enough ad revenues, the network could pay as much as $500 million.

The $300 million minimum that NBC agreed to spend was well above the $225 million that ABC paid to broadcast the 1984 Los Angeles Games but far less than the $600 million that the South Koreans had been seeking. The 1988 price reflects the eleven- to 14-hour time difference between the U.S. and Korea, which means that some of the most popular events will not be seen live by a large part of the world audience. NBC hopes to have better luck with the broadcasts than it did in 1980, when a U.S.-led boycott of the Moscow Games resulted in a $34 million loss for the network.