and doing it in a way that is exciting and engaging is critical. so if a format does allow you to engage in new audiences, then you ve got to explore them as long as you don t compromise the integrity of the sport. and i don t think the hundred compromises the integrity of the sport. test cricket has its place, it has a very clear following, and i think the hundred has a different place in the sport, you know, in cricket. so i think it does play a role, and i think it fills an engagement opportunity for a younger audience, for sure. so would discovery be interested at any point in bidding for the hundred, or bidding for the ashes? i believe there was a rumour that you did bid for the ashes in 2021? we look at everything,
and the men s peaked at 2.5 million so, so far, we ve been really encouraged and blown away by those figures. we ll be hearing more from you on that later, as well as brian henderson, director of cricket for sky sports. but let s start with gb s gold medals, and the olympics coverage on tv this week. andrew georgiou is president of sport at discovery andrew, you are the main broadcaster for the olympics in britain and much of europe, just give us an idea of how big this operation is for you. can you give us a sense of the scale? yes, it s an enormous operation, that s for sure, notjust the broadcast operation, but the entire olympics in tokyo is tens of thousands of people who have gathered, 11,000 athletes plus another 10,000 officials and volunteers, and others who come to actually make this show happen.
and advertising in the uk? i don t think so. i think, obviously discovery+ is a new service in the uk, so i think people are still getting familiar with that service. and up until this month, in fact, sport did not feature on discovery+. and we re using the olympics to really showcase the breadth of content that discovery+ can give the british public and the olympics is a really good way of doing that. and this debate is actually a nice promotional vehicle, and one of the reasons we ve included the olympics on discovery+ is to increase awareness and to showcase the breadth of content that we do have on that product. so i m not sure it s undercooked. and eurosport is another platform that we also have which is in 14 million homes in the uk. so it is a pretty broad distribution that we ve been able to give the games. and have you any idea yet how well it s working? have you got new subscribers because of the olympics? do you know that yet?
i think it s important that if you re going to reach new audiences, you need to cover things in a slightly different way. we went back at the end of 2019, we did a process called sky labs where we set up a full week immersion, a way from the day to day grind of what we normally do, to work out what our strategy was for the tournament. and we came up with five pillars. one was called cricket for everybody, which was really about how we distribute the tournament and constant links to participation it s really important that more girls and boys pick up a bat and ball as part of this. the second pillar was about supercharged entertainment which is what your question is related to and that was about having a different on screen team, about linking between event broadcasts and representing cricket in a slightly more interesting way. the third pillar was called who s winning, which is simply about simplification of graphics and language, so more people could understand the sport. the fo
it s the biggest show on earth, quite frankly, when it comes to sporting events. our operation with our sublicenses is, you know, several thousand in size. we have scaled back the number of people we have sent to tokyo, obviously given the current covid situation here, so we are sending less people than we had originally planned. but it is an enormous operational effort, and in the current environment with additional rules and procedures, and things that we have to do to keep the japanese public safe, it s become a logistical challenge, for sure. and you ve got the rights to the olympic games in 50 european territories? yeah, we ve broadcast them in 50 different markets and 19 different languages across our key platforms. european sport, most european markets, and discovery+, which we launched in seven european markets, including the uk where the launch has gone really, really well. there was a bit of controversy