The primary rights holder for the Olympic Games in Ireland (and the UK) is Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) but for most casual sports fans here, RTÉ will show more than enough to keep you covered. The national broadcaster is set to show 250 hours of live coverage over the course of the games with most days starting around 9am, and continuing all day on RTÉ 2 until 10:30pm.
When needed, for example on Tuesday July 30th, RTÉ will start their broadcast before 7am to ensure live coverage of Irish competitors in action (rowing heats in this example).
RTÉ 2 are breaking their daily schedules into three main programmes with the morning sessions going on until 1/2pm, a midday stretch until 6/7pm and a final "primetime" show until 10:30pm. On the first Sunday, Olympic coverage switches to RTE 1 for a stretch, with the All Ireland football final being shown in its traditional RTE 2 slot. RTE's TV coverage will be mirrored on the RTE Player, but when multiple events clash, the RTE Player will not be covering all of them.
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SEE ALSO: The Full List Of Ireland's Olympics Squad For Paris 2024
RTÉ effectively sublet the rights from Warner Bros Discovery and their agreement only allows for 250 hours of live coverage. We say only, it's still quite a lot of live TV over the course of 3 weeks.
BBC's coverage, widely available in Ireland, is also limited to 250 hours. Their schedule will broadly align with RTÉ's with all-day coverage being split on BBC 1 and BBC 2. Obviously, their focus will be on British competitors, particularly early in the day. In the evening, you can expect RTÉ and BBC to show the same marquee events, including swimming/gymnastics/athletics finals, witballs.ie/…/the-international-media-are-predicting-a-record-medal-haul-for-ireland-at-the-olympics-604839h expert analysis to match.
Streaming the Olympics
Eurosport - available through Pay TV - is owned and operated by WBD and is their primary broadcaster. Eurosport 1 and 2 will be their home for live coverage with studio based panels and the famed VR-style "cube". Eurosport will also have extra TV channels with live and delayed coverage of several events. It hasn't been confirmed by Sky that these will be available in Ireland, but they will be available for Virgin Media customers.
The streaming arm of WBD is Discovery+ and every single minute of televised sport will be available to subscribers. You can either subscribe directly with Discovery+ for €6.99 a month or it can also be bundled with other products. Sky Q customers in Ireland, for example, receive Discovery+ at no additional cost.
Discovery+ will allow you to stream the Eurosport feeds (i.e. with presenters, analysts etc) but will also offer the chance to stream events that are not being covered by TV. For example on the opening Saturday morning of the Games, you can choose between badminton, basketball, handball, rowing, diving, fencing, hockey, judo and more. The commentators will generally be the "world feed" English commentary teams and you may here some familiar Irish voices there too.
The opening ceremony for the Paris Olympics takes place between 6 and 10pm on Friday, July 26th with live coverage on RTÉ, BBC, Eurosport and Discovery+. A number of team sports begin before the ceremony though with RTÉ showing live coverage of Ireland's games in the men's rugby sevens tournament on Wednesday and Thursday. Eurosport and Discovery+ will show every minute of the action.
All coverage will, of course, be available in HD on all platforms with a limited number of events on Eurosport being available in UHD for those with that subscription.
So rest assured, if there's a chance of Ireland winning a medal, you won't miss out!
