Televising the Olympics

As the 2010 Winter Olympic Games take center stage in Vancouver for 17 days in February, a huge Canadian audience is expected to tune in for unprecedented coverage provided by Canada's Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium (COBMC), a partnership between CTV Inc and Rogers Media Inc. One of the key people keeping an eye on the books and ledgers of COBMC, to ensure they are in order during one of the biggest worldwide sporting extravaganzas ever, will be the Consortium's finance manager Neil O'Brien, CGA, who relishes his brush with sporting history. O'Brien earned an accounting diploma from Centennial College in Scarborough in 1996 after five years of part-time studies while working full time. Broadcasters typically pay more for rights to Games held in their home country because audiences tend to be much higher given the local relevance, explains Pamela Mollica, the COBMC's Toronto-based senior communications manager.