[RhysJR]

With less than 100 days to go, I think this deserves its own thread rather than being lumped in with the Olympics.

To the basics...
The 2024 Paralymics will take place from August 28 - September 8.
Unlike the Olympics, the ceremonies will not take place on the River Seine. The Opening Ceremony will take plac on a temporary stadium on the Place de la Concorde (which appears bigger than the Olympic venue in the same area) with the Closing Ceremony taking place at the Stade de France. As ever, the Opening Ceremony is on a Wednesday and the Closing on a Sunday.

There is no changes to the sporting roster from Tokyo.

From a broadcasting perspective, France tv will be the home nation broadcaster, as they are for the Olympics. Channel 4 will cover their fourth summer Paralympics for the UK.
OBS are promising for the first time that all 22 sports will have live coverage available, up from 19 in Tokyo. This is great to hear as the lack of coverage for some events have been a let down on the fantastic broadcasts of previous games. Channel 4's noble attempts to cover the missing events (the two camera set up for para rowing in 2016 a particular highlight) was always welcome but a properly produced is most welcome.

www.svgeurope.org 

Paris 2024: The IPC on making the Paralympic Games the best ever while changing …
[caption id=attachment_98417 align=aligncenter width=715] One of the Paralympic …
  Source: www.svgeurope.org

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Today, Channel 4 have announced that every single moment of the games will be broadcast via YouTube once again. The Channel 4 Sport YouTube channel will offer up to 18 simultaneous streams and over 1300 hours of coverage. This suggests that only the coverage on Channel 4 and More 4 will be made available to stream via the Channel 4 streaming platform with the bonus coverage on YouTube.

I think I'm broadly in favour of this. The YouTube navigation is generally quite good and should offer things like rewind that is unable on channel streams via Channel 4. The quotes in the press release are making a thing about YouTube being popular with younger generations; whilst that is probably true, I think a slightly broader point with YouTube streams is that they could have more casual viewers come across them, which is a positive for the Paralympics and Channel 4. This also does imply that the Channel 4 streaming platform might not be able to handle 18 bonus streams.

www.channel4.com 

Channel 4 and YouTube team up to bring Paris 2024 Paralympic Games coverage to e…
With more than 1300 hours of coverage and up to 18 concurrent streams, Channel 4…
  Source: www.channel4.com

As announced last year, Channel 4's coverage will be produced by Whisper Cymru from Cardiff. This will be the wider Whisper company's second Paralympics for Channel 4, after taking over from Sunset+Vine for the pandemic affected Tokyo games. This will be the biggest sport production ever based in Wales.

www.tvbeurope.com 

Channel 4 to remote produce 2024 Paris Paralympics from Wales - TVBEurope
Whisper is planning to build new state-of-the-art technical facilities, includin…
  Source: www.tvbeurope.com

[Brekkie]

Although YouTube is probably easier it does highlight how lacking "Channel 4" is in seemingly be unable to add multiple live events to it's own streamer. I wonder if they'll be able to put a link within the app to take you to the YouTube app instead - that's the frustration here, and it's the same with the Olympic streams being on Discovery+ too. You just want to be able to get to them as easily as possible from the main C4 coverage.

I still think it was a mistake back in 2012 not to use the technology they already had in place to stream additional BOX music channels via the red button on 4Music on Freeview to offer what was then three Paralympic streams and then expand on it moving forward. It's a shame only the BBC and I guess QVC seem to integrate their streaming channels so they can be accessed from the linear channels.


Talking of linear very little detail there - C4 is almost mentioned as an afterthought in that and no suggestion there will be more than one channel of coverage. Last time they used More4 for the "team events" which worked well enough but didn't particularly rate. It would be good to have at least a second linear channel available for them to use - 4Seven might make more sense than More4 or a combination of them both. Ideally you'd have two extra streams - one focused on team events, the other on individual, but that seems highly unlikely.

C4's commitment though is certainly fading - no coverage at all of the World Para Athletics Championships this week, not even on their YouTube channel. With the games coming up they'd have been good promo this week with 100 days to go and fitted nicely in the morning schedules for around three hours of live coverage from Japan. With the time zone differences for LA 2028 and Brisbane 2032 I get the feeling C4 wouldn't be too upset if they put in such a low offer someone else picked them up.