Thank you. Mr. Frappier will follow me.
Good morning, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee and committee staff.
Thank you for the invitation to discuss with you the Olympic consortium's exciting plans for French-language broadcasting coverage of the 2010 Olympic Games.
My name is Rick Brace. I am the president of revenue business planning and sports for CTV Inc. I am pleased to be joined by Gerry Frappier, who is the French chef de mission for Canada's Olympic broadcasting media consortium, as well as the president of Le Réseau des Sports and Le Réseau Info-Sports. We are also joined on the panel today by David Goldstein, senior vice-president of regulatory affairs for CTVglobemedia.
To be the official broadcast partner of the 2010 Olympic Games in our own country is a source of tremendous pride for CTVglobemedia. Our guarantee is to provide the most hours of coverage across the most platforms and deliver the most comprehensive coverage ever witnessed. Our commitment is to tell the stories, create the heroes, and make Canada's athletes household names to Canadians, in both official languages.
To do this, we have brought together some of the finest television and radio broadcasters in Canada. While Rogers is our main broadcast partner for television and radio, we are also working with RDS, RIS, TQS, APTN, and Corus Radio.
As French chef de mission, Gerry is responsible for coordinating with our partners, and he shares our commitment to ensuring an unprecedented level of French-language coverage. We are achieving unprecedented coverage because, for the first time ever by a Canadian broadcaster, every single second of live events will be broadcast on one of our French-language television stations as it will be on our English-language television stations.
To be clear, this means that all 655 hours of live events in the 2010 Winter Games, including the opening and closing ceremonies, right through to the gold medal hockey game and beyond, will be broadcast in both official languages. Never before has this been accomplished.
Turning now to other broadcast platforms, we have granted Corus Radio, with 10 French-language radio stations in Quebec, exclusive access to all RDS and TQS content. This will allow them to broadcast live on-site reports and news updates from the Olympics, including live play-by-play of the women's and men's hockey, as well as access to television audio for simulcasts of gold medal events and interviews with our athletes. As well, all TQS and RDS coverage will be streamed live and will be available on demand on our broadband platform.
Our comprehensive broadcast plans mean that Canadians will be able to watch an unlimited number of hours of the games and choose what they want, when they want. In fact, there will be more opportunities for viewing than at any previous Olympics. Between television and broadband, there will be 4,500 hours of Olympic events accessible for Canadians to watch.
Gerry will continue.