For viewers of the BBC Olympics coverage, it’s back to the old days. Not since Sydney in 2000 has all the Games content been squeezed into the main terrestrial channels, with the red button and its one extra stream making its debut in Athens 2004. ‘The Olympics are perfect for interactive television,’ said a BBC executive celebrating the innovation, ‘because there are so many events happening at the same time.’ In the run up to London 2012 we made the promise that UK viewers would be able to watch any event they chose, from beginning to end – and the corporation delivered 24 HD television channels and an equivalent number of online streams to achieve that. The research was unanimous: it allowed tens of millions of people to share every moment, and they loved the amount of choice they could exercise.
Now, in Tokyo, the BBC’s offering has shrunk back to a regular format of one live main channel service and one more via the red button and online – provoking a predictable cloudburst of criticism.
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