While the world’s finest athletes competed for Olympic glory in Tokyo, a broadcasting battle for the nation’s viewers has played out back in the UK: the BBC’s limited coverage versus the thousands of hours of live action offered by US pay-TV giant Discovery. Tokyo marks the end of the BBC’s history of wall-to-wall coverage and its right to be called the sole home of the summer Games. This year was the first that a pay-TV or streaming subscription was needed to be able to watch all events. The story of how this came about is a twisting tale. Broadcast rights negotiations are an intricate and tangled business, with moves plotted years ahead. The result has been a messy compromise over the UK rights, with no clear winners. Five years ago Discovery, which owns Eurosport and channels including Quest, paid €1.3bn for the pan-European TV rights to the winter games in 2022 and Paris 2024. However, under UK regulations regarding “listed”, or protected, events, the Olympics must still receive significant live coverage by a free-to-air broadcaster. Sensing the danger of Discovery potentially partnering with a rival such as ITV, the BBC, which at the time owned the full rights to this year’s Tokyo Games, came up with a strategy. It opted to sacrifice the majority of this summer’s rights to Discovery in return for a deal guaranteeing that it would be able to air coverage of next year’s winter Games in Beijing and the 2024 summer Olympics. The result meant the BBC has shown just 500 hours of coverage and a maximum of two live events at one time, compared with 24 live streams and blanket coverage on its TV channels during Rio and London, while Discovery has broadcast 3,500 hours. Although there have been viewer complaints about the BBC’s decision to strike a reduced-hours deal, particularly as it meant many minority sports did not get their rare moment on the nation’s biggest TV channels, it could have been worse. In Norway and Sweden, Discovery chose to air the Olympics on its own channels, but the company considered the public relations fallout too risky to use this strategy in the UK. “I don’t think anyone at Discovery wanted to be the people that took the Olympics off the BBC,” said Peter Hutton, the former chief executive of Eurosport, after striking the sub-licensing deal with the corporation in 2016. The idea of splitting the rights first emerged in 2009 and at the time Roger Mosey, the former BBC director of sport, warned that such a plan would be a “disaster”. “It hasn’t been as good for viewers this time round,” said Mosey of the coverage of the Tokyo Games. “The BBC offering has been less rich than in 2012 and 2016, and inevitably audiences for some sports will have fallen now that they’re behind a paywall. We need to look at whether the protection of the Olympic Games as a listed event should mean making it all available rather than confining free-to-air to just one channel and one stream.” However, with the BBC facing mounting financial pressure, and with increasingly powerful and wealthy tech and media giants looming in the entertainment sector, the corporation had few moves available to preserve its coverage. “The BBC’s coverage has been very good, but viewers have lost out as they now have to subscribe to watch it all,” said Colin Browne, chair of the consumer group Voice of the Listener and Viewer. “It is another example of the challenges facing free-to-air broadcasters against the might and money of the global giants, which is where the balance of power is moving.” Discovery has made the Olympics available through nine Eurosport-branded pay-TV channels on Sky, Virgin and BT. Enders Analysis estimates that only about 10 million homes in the UK, about a third of the country, had access as part of their existing pay-TV subscriptions. The company also made additional live streams of events available through Discovery+, which costs £6.99 a month, although the app has only been downloaded 25,000 times on the Apple Store since launching last November. A deal with Vodafone also means Discovery+ has been potentially available to 13 million UK pay-monthly customers. A giant Discovery may be, but in the viewing-figures war the BBC was always going to triumph. With free access, and the two top slots on every television programme guide guaranteed under UK broadcasting regulations, the corporation remains the default destination for Olympics coverage for the vast majority of viewers. For example, the men’s 100m final attracted 5.1 million TV viewers on the BBC, but just 100,000 tuned into Eurosport 1, according to BARB figures. David Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery, has described the event as a “success” that has led to “healthy viewing and subscriptions”. Discovery said that as of Tuesday more than 275 million viewers in Europe had tuned in for the Games, with about 100 million of those watching its coverage, and the other 175 million viewers via sublicensing agreements with broadcasters such as the BBC in the UK, Rai in Italy and France TV. Discovery says the rights have helped it attract a record number of new subscribers, taking its total global base to 17 million. The BBC said on Wednesday that in the first 10 days of the Games, 32.8 million people had tuned in to watch. It recorded a further 68.8 million online viewing requests for live streams across the iPlayer, the BBC Sport website and its app. “A minority of people have been annoyed by the [BBC’s] reduced coverage,” said Tom Harrington at Enders. “The BBC made a pragmatic move. If they had carried dozens of simultaneous streams it would be costly, but the reality is not many people would have watched them, particularly with the time-zone issue. Of course the BBC would want to have everything, but times have changed.” And they are set to change again in the not too distant future. The International Olympic Committee’s current European rights deal expires after the Paris games in 2024. The question now is who might bid – Discovery, or new entrants such as Amazon Prime, ITV, Channel 4 or Channel 5 – and what role the BBC might play. “The IOC has already started the sales process for the 2026-28 Olympics and is talking to broadcasters and agencies,” said one senior broadcasting source. “The BBC has the chance to bid and take the rights back exclusively, but I have severe doubts about their ability to do that on the budget available.” Live Tokyo viewing Many events took place in the early hours of the morning, UK time, so live viewing was limited for some of the most memorable moments, with audiences electing to watch them later iPlayer, or via highlights shows. Discovery did not share figures, so the following are for the BBC only. However, these were among the biggest moments: Charlotte Dujardin wins record fifth Olympic dressage medal (2.8m viewers, 2pm, 28 July) Opening ceremony (2.3m viewers, 12pm-3.30pm, 23 July) Simone Biles pulls out of team gymnastics final (1.9m viewers, 12.15pm, 27 July) Adam Peaty wins Team GB’s first gold medal and makes Olympic history (560,000 viewers, 3.20am, 26 July) Sky Brown becomes GB’s youngest medallist in park skateboarding (370,000 viewers, 5.15am, 4 August)