NBC Partners With Twitch To Broadcast 2020 Tokyo Olympics

NBC Olympics have announced a partnership with streaming platform Twitch to broadcast the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

As part of the agreement, Twitch will broadcast more than 150 hours of programming and will host a variety of content such as interactive clip shows, daily competitions, primetime sidecasting, live interviews and footage from Tokyo.

In a statement, Twitch chief content officer, Michael Aragon, said: “The way that people consume traditional sporting events is changing.”

“They no longer want to simply spectate; they want to be as close to the action and athletes as possible,” Aragon said.

“We’ve seen this firsthand with the growth of our sports community on Twitch, as viewers tune in not only to watch their favourite athletes, but to also take part in pregame and postgame interviews and virtually connect with other fans from around the world,” he said.

Twitch joins organisations Snap Inc., Twitter, and NowThis in broadcasting the 2020 Olympics digitally as well as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) who recently announced a new digital content platform for Olympics.com

In other Games news, Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) president, John Coates is confident that the Tokyo Olympic Games will go ahead as scheduled following some concern from Japanese officials.

A current petition to cancel the Olympics has over 230,000 signatures, with Coates saying it “is a concern”, but thinks that there is a “correlation between the numbers who are concerned about their safety with the numbers who have been vaccinated in Japan.”

“The numbers are very small, particularly amongst the elderly,” Coates said.

“As the vaccine is rolled out in Japan, I think that will improve,” he said.