The attention given to Euro 2008 by the North American networks should have inspired a good amount of appreciation from the game's devotees, because the telecasts have been of a high quality and they've been accessible.
In the United States, viewers, who four years ago had no choice but to buy pay-per-view telecasts of the tournament or go to a bar, were able to watch the games on ESPN and ESPN2.
For Canadian fans, TSN and Rogers Sportsnet complemented its live daytime coverage with plenty of repeats in prime time and late at night.
The networks are full of praise for the host broadcast feed from Austria, which produced high definition telecasts and, with more cameras in use than in 2004, delivered multiple angles and slow motion replays.
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"This is probably the best feed I've seen for any world event, period," ESPN senior vice-president Jed Drake said this week.
When there is no feed, it's a problem, of course. And that was the case Wednesday when a storm in Austria knocked out the host signal of the Germany-Turkey semi-final worldwide for about 25 minutes.
If the host broadcaster had used its own power source, a generator, instead of the local grid, there would not have been a blackout.
For tomorrow's Spain-Germany championship game, a generator will provide the power. ABC will air the game, as will TSN in Canada.
TSN will continue to use a host broadcast announcer, in this case John Helm. Over the course of the tournament, the host announcers have worked alone and their work has been fine, although a good game analyst in the booth would have made the play-by-play even better.
ABC, with its telecast, will continue with the ESPN system in which a play-by-play team, Adrian Healey and Andy Gray tomorrow, calls the game off a monitor from the ESPN studios in Bristol, Conn.
It's hard to know when a major U.S. network last provided play-by-play of a big event off-site, but it's worked well so far, mainly because ESPN used its resources to acquire the services of Gray, an analyst with Sky Sports in Britain.
Gray, one of the game's top commentators, has been a hit, providing energetic and insightful studio and game analysis.
For TSN and Sportsnet, the studio analysis has been handled by Dick Howard and Craig Forrest. Of the two, Forrest has provided the clearer and more assertive commentary. Both started the tournament assuming Canadian viewers knew more than was realistic to expect them to know about European soccer, but the information improved as the coverage progressed.
The audiences on TSN and Sportsnet are up from Euro 2004. The preliminary round averaged 219,000 viewers a telecast - a 1 per cent increase. Quarter-final numbers jumped 34 per cent (a 574,000 average) and the first semi-final, Germany-Turkey, showed an increase of 40 per cent (450,000 viewers) over the 2004 Portugal-Netherlands semi-final.
The second semi-final, Russia-Spain, drew a disappointing 241,000, down 61 per from the Greece-Czech Republic semi-final in 2004 (613,000).
Still, for the entire medal round, quarters and semis, the audiences were up 14 per cent.
Clearly, the quality of play helped inspire interest in the games. During a conference call, Gray spoke to the competitiveness of the tournament by noting he felt there were only four teams going in, that had no hope of winning - the two host nations, Austria and Switzerland, plus Greece and Poland.
"The other 12 teams I thought were probably good enough to beat each other," he said. "And I think another factor [enhancing the drama of the games] is the defences have been suspect. That has only added, in my opinion, to the excitement of the tournament.
"Very rarely do you get a tournament as important as this that serves as much drama, excitement, so many goals, so many talking points."
The Score did well with its NBA draft telecast on Thursday night. It was watched by 106,000 viewers, the network's largest audience for the show in eight years.
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