Sat.1 starts Tour coverage. ZDF promises to drop football.
For part of
Stage 11,
I watched the new Tour live coverage on
Sat.1
who
bought the German rights.
When Sat.1 is busy,
Pro7
will cover it.
The two stations are owned by the same company, along with Kabel1, N24 and 9Live.
The coverage was OK - the same French
pictures as everyone else, but fewer
extra features than ARD/ZDF. Commentary was a bit
pedestrian, but that's like ZDF.
I like Eurosport's commentary much more.
International Herald Tribune reports that Eurosport's ratings tripled for stage 10
which is unsurprising.
Eurosport and Sat.1 both seem to be on the
same ~30% of
German DVB-T
as well as
DVB-S.
In comments on
my last post about this,
Thomas asked:
"You don't read German papers, do you?"
No. I've not even tried to buy one since
moving to this village.
"I do, and I'm neither outraged nor surprised. It is a fairly logical step in light of the debate and the public reception of the tour, cycling pros, and Team T-Mobile in particular."
Is it public reception?
Around 50% of those polled by ZDF disagreed
with
the decision (according to the IHT link above).
Given all the ZDF spin on this,
that's shockingly low.
Is this driven by the silly debate of
Bundestag members, rather
than public opinion?
(I've still not forgiven them for booting
Eurosport off of ZDFvision. CDU seem to
like messing ARD/ZDF about.)
Are German papers in a feeding frenzy?
In some days, they'll move onto football or
boxing or something else.
Get this in context: it's not like the old
scandals where we had pro teams or wives
being caught with car boots full of drug kits.
"I'd also bet that T-Mobile will quit as a sponsor."
It didn't seem like that from TV interviews,
but I guess they wouldn't say yet.
I think if they were going to jump ship,
they would have done it after last year's
worse problems.
AIUI, their contract expires 2010 anyway and
I wonder whether all the good publicity from
their tour outing in England will
help them stay until then.
"Some things belong in pharmacology textbooks and not on TV screens."
Does this mean drugs or incomplete drug tests? ;-)
"If I paid German TV fees, I'd be outraged that this comes that late. But then, I know better and don't have a TV in the first place."
Oh, well! Then I guess nothing would convince
you to watch the tour!
Philipp Kern commented:
"they did not threaten for a year actually. After the big doping scandal some months ago they explicitly announced that they
will
drop the Tour de France if a new doping case pops up. Granted, the person in question did dope before the Tour."
We don't know that yet - only one sample has
been tested so far and even then, this test
is controversial and has been successfully
appealed against before. It's only a case.
Also, maybe it wasn't the TdF, but
here's a comment about ARD in 2006 threatening to drop cycling
(scroll to 25.10.).
"The argumentation is that the Tour should not be a contest of the best doping substances like it could have been the last years.
But I am probably biased because I don't watch the Tour, or sports in general."
No more biased than ARD/ZDF's producers,
it seems.
In an interview on itv4,
a ZDF producer said they would drop
any sporting event
with a doping problem like cycling.
So, if
ZDF have dropped cycling for 1 in 189
participants being
accused
of doping,
then if any footballer is
accused
of
drugs offences, they cannot show any matches
involving them. If you want to take football
off ZDF, you know what to do...
Thijs Kinkhorst reports in "Too much testosterone" that NOS
also continues coverage, like our
itv.
Good on them.
Let's applaud any drug cheats getting caught
and punished, after we're reasonably sure.
Syndicated 2007-07-20 01:43:00 from MJR slef-reflection Recent Changes