[Brekkie]

Even if you subscibed, the "extra channels" on Eurosport last time were quite poor, much of the time not showing things of interest to a UK audience at all. The BBC losing all those extra feeds has been terrible. You needed to subscribe again to Discovery+ on top of that to get the sport you actually wanted.

And some of them had different audio to the sports they were showing. Really was quite poor and would have probably been easier for them to let the BBC have half a dozen streams or so and handle the linear additional output whilst having the streaming rights themselves.

I would guess those won't appear this time with it all just being via Discovery+. Last time I had the channels via Amazon Prime and Eurosport Player, which I could only watch via the laptop as the smart TV app had stopped working months prior. I cancelled after that and haven't had Discovery+ at all since but will probably for the games. Even if I mainly watch the BBC live events in Paris will finish around 9pm so probably catch up on other things then, assuming that is possible.

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Or blame the IOC for going behind the backs of all their long running FTA partners across Europe in 2015 to do a deal with Discovery, knowing that it will likely restrict the amount of FTA visibilty of their event across Europe. Or for the BBC Sport negotiators for failing to get a more sizeable share of the action like some of their respective broadcasters across Europe when they sublet from Discovery in 2016 or when the new EBU-WBD Olympics deal was agreed.

Exactly. IMO Thomas Bach has been a disaster for the IOC, taking coverage away from free to air TV in it's European heartland and also making a mess of the bidding process by basically taking it behind closed doors. Brisbane 2032 is basically a retirement present for an Aussie IOC member and they're currently looking at building a temporary athletics stadium smaller than what Birmingham had for the Commonwealth Games.

Business wise as is so often the case the short term gain is usually short sighted. We saw with the BBC how they basically ended up paying Discovery more for less (though as you say a bad deal on the BBC's part) - but it just shows that it's likely had the IOC gone directly to the EBU and PSBs they could have made more money themselves rather than gifted the profit to Discovery.