BBC Winter Olympics Ad

CTV Olympic's I Believe

Great New Pictures from Canada Place

Canada Place, home to the International Media Centre, has installed new "lighting", if you can call it that, putting images and colours associated with the Olympics along the iconic sails that make up the roof of the convention centre.

See all the pictures here.

For Our Country, For Our City...

Here's a great promotional video from CTV, the Canadian broadcast home of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games...

2010 Promo Videos...

With approx three weeks to go until the Vancouver 2010 games the world is getting excited!

Here's a few promo videos. One from Australia, Germany, and China...







It's not too late to secure your 2010 accommodation. Click here for more than one hundred listings!

NBC's 2010 Promo

Vancouver Convention Centre Aerial Video

Here's a neat video of the Vancouver Convention Centre that will house the accredited media for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games:

NBC's Today Show :: Six Months to 2010

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Vote for your Top 10 Canadian Olympic Moments

The Royal Canadian Mint and Canada's Olympic Broadcasting Media Consortium are asking you to vote for your top 10 Canadian Olympic Moments.

If you had to choose the most outstanding achievement of a Canadian winter Olympian, what would it be? What is your favourite goosebump-raising, spine-tingling Olympic memory? Is it Cindy Klassen’s five medals at the Torino 2006 Olympic Winter Games? Or maybe it’s a throwback to Grenoble 1968 when Nancy Greene won gold and silver in alpine skiing?

The Top 10 Canadian Olympic Winter Moments finalists, as selected by an independent voting panel are (in chronological order):
•Nancy Greene — gold medal and silver medal, alpine skiing, Grenoble 1968
•Gaétan Boucher — two gold medals and one bronze medal, speed skating, Sarajevo 1984
•Marc Gagnon — gold medal, short track speed skating, Salt Lake 2002
•Catriona Le May Doan — gold medal, speed skating, Salt Lake 2002
•Men's Hockey Team — gold medal, Salt Lake 2002
•Women's Hockey Team — gold medal, Salt Lake 2002
•Jamie Salé and David Pelletier — gold medal, figure skating, Salt Lake 2002
•Beckie Scott — gold medal, cross-country skiing, Salt Lake 2002
•Cindy Klassen — one gold medal, two silver medals and two bronze medals, speed skating, Torino 2006
•Clara Hughes — gold medal, speed skating, Torino 2006

Read more and place your vote by visiting here.

1st image: Marc Gagnon (Getty Images), 2nd image: Nancy Drew (Getty Images)

2010 Vancouver Athletes Village Commentary

Photo by eyesplash mikul

We feel it necessary to comment on the myriad of articles hitting the presses in ever increasing numbers over the past while, most of which seem to be painting a very dire picture of what could happen with the Vancouver Athletes Village.

First off, when the plan was formulated, no one could have fathomed that a global credit crisis of the magnitude we are all seeing would have come to fruition.

Secondly, no one would have thought that the Vancouver real estate market would have slowed down as quickly as it has.

That being said, the numbers being referenced for potential liability for the City of Vancouver, should the proverbial excrement really hit the fan are completely sensationalized and the reporting of them is at best irresponsible. So to make a little better sense of the numbers please consider the following:

• $1B - total approx. cost of the Olympic Village
• $200M - approx. value of the 250 condos already pre-sold with 20% deposits
• 10% - approx. drop in real estate prices from the peak value in May 2008
• Millennium Group of Companies had to put up other properties as security for the South East False Creek Lands the Olympic Village is being constructed on (SEFC valued at $150M)
  

You may have seen numbers of anywhere from $800M to $1B being what the city could be liable for.

Yes... if the condos being built can not be sold for as little as $1, then the city would be on the hook for a large chunck of change, likely in the neighbourhood of $800M. Though the city would gain the property securitized from the Mellinnium Group of Companies and the liklihood of the condos not being marketable at any price is nil.

So if we assume that the prices for the condos end up being 20% less than previous projections, on average, we can assume that there is a max potential shortfall of approximately $200M between the City of Vancouver and Millenium Group of Companies. A far cry from the $1B numbers being thrown around by juvenile reporters. (I might point out that it seems that most of the sensationalist articles are coming from the CanWest news service that did not win the bid to broadcast the Olympics... hmmm.)

My understanding is that this shortfall would primarily fall on Mellinnium Groups shoulders, though in all liklihood the city would be out at least $50-100M.

That being said a fantastic new neighbourhood will be born... so will the city really lose anything?

CTV/Rogers Unveils 2010 Broadcast Team

CTV/Rogers unveiled their broadcast team for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games today. More than 140 people will make up the team headed by Brian Williams, formerly of the CBC.

The hosts & reporters are many well known English & French language personalities.

For the complete story and list of persons doing what please click here.

Believe in 2010 Athletes

The Rogers-CTV Globemedia consortium has just launched an advertising campaign inspiring Canadians to believe in our 2010 athletes.

The BELIEVE ads, which are airing on CTV now, are narrated by veteran actor Donald Sutherland and are set to the music of Howard Shore -- the Oscar-winning composer who wrote the music for the acclaimed Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

You can read more about the campaign and watch the commercials here.

With Glowing Hearts

Version Francais:

VANOC Snaps Up Ad Space

You were going to have a hard time missing the fact that the Olympics were going on in Vancouver in 2010 with all the buzz that's expected buy now VANOC has ensured there's no possible way that you could miss it.

Everything from billboards to mall posters to baggage carousels at YVR, to every possible inch of space on TransLink's fleet will carry the corporate 2010 Olympic message.

The achieve all this guaranteed ad space VANOC had to pay full-rate on all of it with adjustment for inflation.

Read more here.

Chilly Reception from IOC re: VANOCs Ticket Sales Ideas

I don't the the IOC is every really seen as the friendliest body and this is not exception as their alottment of tickets, typically around 30% to every event, is being questioned by VANOC. As a result of the empty seat epidemic visible in nearly every Olympic games the Vancouver Organizing Committee has a novel plan to try to cure the problem... give less tickets to the IOC and sell more to the paying public.

Sounds like a good plan, right? "Wrong!" says the IOC. Not surprisingly they're giving this Vancouver attempt a chilly reception as it could be a slippery slope loosening the death grip they currently hold on the organization of everything Olympic.

David Cobb, VANOC executive vp, revealed the unique idea to the Vancouver Sun last week and it had not yet been discussed with the IOC.

Fortunately the disagreement on the forward thinking plan seems to far to only be with the reduction and relocation of media vs. the IOC on the whole. We'll have to monitor where this goes from here as empty seats have made most recent Olympics a failure, at least on some levels.

New Entry Court at Canada Place

Expo '86 saw a big infrastructure boom for Vancouver and the Lower Mainland including such notable fixtures as Sky Train, the Alex Fraser Bridge, Science World, and Canada Place which houses the Vancouver Trade and Convention Centre.

The expanded Vancouver Trade and Convention Centre (VTCC) will house the media for Vancouver 2010 and service countless conventions leading up to the Olymipcs and well after their departure.

To bridge the existing VTCC, Canada Place Corporation will develop a new Entry Court between the two sections. A dramatic face lift will be performed on the current public plaza housing one of Vancouver's least inspiring fountains and will be replaced allowing for a link between the East and West sections of the VTCC.

The Welcome Centre will be a place where staff and displays will provide information about Canada Place, events at the facilities, and Canada.

Pieces of the existing fountain will be re-used in the lobby of the Convention Centre as a nod the Expo '86 legacy.

VANOC Missing Chinese TV Rights Deal

Last year VANOC secured an unprecedented broadcasting rights payments deal with the IOC. The IOC had told VANOC that they would receive approx. $450M US in television rights payments, but Dave Cobb, VP of Marketing, and John Furlong, VANOC's CEO, negotiated that up to a figure reaching almost $600M CDN.

However, a deal between the IOC and China has just been signed for the 2010 and 2012 Olympic Broadcasting Rights reportedly in the three-figure multi-million dollar region. Prior to this China has been broadcasting under an existing licensing arrangement for a reported $18.5M.

This late rights deal may not benefit Vancouver 2010 though, in terms of contribution to the budget in light of the previously negotiated contract with the IOC. The contract could potentially be renegotiated though or at the very least the payment VANOC has to make to the IOC for the rights of nearly $200M could possibly be reduced or the one-time payment from the IOC of $35M to the $100M VANOC Contingency could possibly be increased.

The IOC negotiates rights broadcasting for 2 Olympic sets at a time. The previous set which included the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics and the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics has generated approximately $2.6B in revenue. The 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics and 2012 London Summer Olympics are expected to fetch close to $4B.

More from the Calgary Harald.

Premier Unveils Details of 2010 International Media Centre

The world's media will come to Vancouver in 2010 and just like in Beijing there isn't room for every media person in the Ling Long Pagoda. (Peter Mansbridge, of the CBC, has been reporting in Beijing from an exterior stairwell of the Pagoda.) The Vancouver 2010 Media Centre will be an amazing place, but will not house everyone, thus the Province has added another media venue for more of the non-accredited (by the IOC) international media persons that will be in town at Robson Square.

The 2600 meter state-of-the-art facility is designed to be a one-stop-shop of resources for the world’s media community. The 2010 International Media Centre (IMC) will co-ordinate technology, information, transportation and hospitality, as well as access to officials and athletes for members of the press corps. Additionally, the 2010 IMC will also be a broadcast hub for a number of key domestic and international broadcast organizations.

The Robson Square location will be adjacent to the Commerce Centre and a showcase space in the heart of downtown Vancouver, a central location in between the official Media Centre and BC Place Stadium, GM Place, and the Athletes Village.

Source: Government of British Columbia