The United States Olympic Committee (USOC) will launch a cable television network next year, with cable-operator Comcast having agreed to carry the channel.
The USOC has the rights to 31 national governing bodies of Olympic sports, the Olympic archives and the exclusive rights to the US Olympic Trials after 2012 when current licensing agreements expire. Programming on its channel will include news reports, commentary, interviews, documentaries, movies, and classic Olympic footage.
The NBC-owned Olympic-sports channel Universal Sports has the rights to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
“We don’t see ourselves as competing with Universal Sports,” said USOC’s chief operating officer Norman Bellingham. “There may be international federation events that we may be competing with them to secure the rights to, but we can ourselves very much co-exist.”
The channel, to be called the US Olympic Network (USON), will launch in 2010 and will broadcast all year-round with additional video-on-demand and internet streaming.
USON will be launched on Comcast’s digital basic tier.
