According to forecasts by AGB Nielson, a worldwide media research company, viewers of the Beijing Olympics will top 4 billion, a new high from 3.9 billion viewers of the Athens Olympic Games. Beijing will also see a gathering of 16,000 broadcasters from over 200 rights-holding broadcasting institutions, a record in Olympic history.

Since the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games, the mode of making public signals for Olympic broadcasting has been shifted from relying on the host country to multinational cooperation. BOB has invited some Chinese broadcasting institutions, including CCTV and BTV to assume the responsibility for the international public signals of seven events in 19 arenas, including table tennis, badminton, modern pentathlon, football, basketball, volleyball and tennis. This is also the first specified team of Beijing Olympic broadcasters and the first large-scale participation of Chinese television media in Olympic broadcasting.

"The homeland broadcasting production scale will not be easily surpassed in future Olympic Games," commented Yiannis Exarchos, 41-year-old Senior Executive Officer of BOB. Before that, CCTV was in charge of international public signals for the table tennis and badminton events at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, the first time that China's television media had participated in international signal production.

"Olympic broadcasting will leave a great legacy for China," said Yiannis. It not only refers to the broadcasting technology per se, but also includes the production system of creative audio and visual products. Veteran television top gun Yiannis, who was involved in broadcasting work for the Olympic Games in Athens, Sydney and Salt Lake City, cited Greece as an example to illustrate his opinion. Greeks are creative in visual products but their television industry lacks an efficient cooperation system. The situation has been greatly changed since the Olympic Games came in. In this regard, China's television industry is also expected to benefit from the broadcasting experience.

Yiannis thought highly of a project that will see around a thousand college graduates involved in the broadcasting for training purposes. "This is of great significance to China. The youth will have the chance to work with the best broadcasting staff, and they might take the Olympic broadcasting as the start of their future careers."

"For a long time China's sports television program production has remained at a low level," confessed Ma. Before becoming COO of BOB, he was director of the CCTV sports center and learned much about the business.

In the past when China's economic condition was not so good, the television signal producers in China were under-financed and poorly equipped. But in recent years things have got much better. "However, the quality of television signals leaves much to be desired, mainly because our standard is lower. But it's surely an improvement for China given its participation in the high standard of signal production in the Olympic Games," Ma noted.

Ma held that the Games will alter the attitude of Chinese television producers toward increasing investment. "Chinese television production will benefit from the high standards of the international television industry," said Ma.

Next year's Beijing Games will be a milestone in Olympic history: BOB will for the first time broadcast 3,800 hours of high definition television signals to the world.

"It will be a turning point as important as the transformation from black-and-white television to colored television," Ma said proudly, adding that the high definition signals can be converted into standard definition signals.