Boomers & Opals highlight GIFs? Olympic committee says nope
The Boomers and Opals are hours away from playing their first games. We're all excited for videos and GIFs of buzzer-beating threes and emphatic dunks to be immortalised all over the internet, seconds after the highlight moments occur. Unfortunately, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) frowns on this.
According to section 2 of the news access rules for the Olympics broadcast, titled Internet and Mobile Platforms. Note bolded sections:
"Notwithstanding any other applicable limitation included in these NARs, Olympic Material must not be broadcast on interactive services such as “news active” or “sports active” or any other related Video on Demand services, which would allow the viewer to make a viewing choice within a channel and to thereby view Olympic Material at times and programs other than when broadcast as part of a News Program as set out in Clause 1 above.
Additionally, the use of Olympic Material transformed into graphic animated formats such as animated GIFs (i.e. GIFV), GFY, WebM, or short video formats such as Vines and others, is expressly prohibited."
The IOC owns the rights to all Rio Olympic event coverage, and it's understandable if they prefer to limit access rights to their preferred broadcasting entities. The inability to even capture GIFs however, is tough.
What does this mean for The Pick and Roll's Olympic coverage?
We have expanded our multimedia coverage over the recent months, providing GIFs and video coverage whenever video footage is made available.
As much as we would love to do the same for the Olympics, the IOC's strict rules mean we will restrict our coverage on the Boomers and Opals to:
In-game social media coverage (mainly via our Twitter account @PickandRollAU)
Post-game recaps, and
News cycle coverage as stories surface
Video and/or GIF highlights will unfortunately not be produced or hosted on our YouTube, Facebook or Twitter channels.