Originally Posted by Mae
Again unless it is the Winter Olympics in the U.S. we get very little coverage of Alpine Skiing
When talking about free-to-air channels, that's very much the case in Finland too. Olympics are shown free-to-air because 1)law forces OG to be shown free-to-air and 2)rights are owned by the national broadcasting company. World Ch'ships are also shown free to air because their rights are owned by the national broadcasting company, even if Alpine Worlds aren't mandatory to show free-to-air unlike e.g. Nordic skiing Worlds.
But World Cup's rights are owned by a commercial channel and it has almost all sports on PPV channels. A few Alpine races are shown on that group's FTA channel because 1) they do that to advertise PPV channel and/or 2) there's a more important event to show on PPV channel.
But that's the case with tennis too. OG was the only big tournament in years (previus probably was Beijing '08
) they showed on FTA channels because the national broadcasting company owned the rights. But AO, RG, and USO (plus some MMs) are on EuroSport and Wimby, Masters Series, and WTF (plus some MMs) are on Canal+ (or whatever it's called nowadays). National broadcasting company usually showes Nieminen's finals unless the rights are already owned by another channel, like was the case with Sydney final.