and the next wedding

The next royal wedding of the year will take place on July 2 in Monaco when Prince Albert marries South African-born swimmer Charlene Wittstock.  The wedding will be televised throughout Europe, but American networks have not yet made any commitments to broadcasting the wedding.

It is unlikely that all three networks, along with the BBC, CNN, MSNBC, FOX, TLC, among others, will be devoting as many hours to Albert's marriage as was devoted to the Duke of Cambridge's wedding.

The networks spent a major amount of their 2011 budgets on their coverage of the revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East.  Mix in the Royal Wedding and now the Bin Laden story.  There may not be enough cash to send full anchor teams to Monaco and to purchase the broadcast rights to the wedding. 

Prince Albert is well-known in the United States.  He is half-American.  He attended Amherst University.  He speaks English with an American accent.   He is the son of Grace Kelly, but Grace Kelly is largely not familiar to younger Americans.  When I visited the Princess Grace exhibit in September at the V&A, most of the people walking through the rooms were women were of a certain age.

But the Sovereign Prince of Monaco is not as well-known here in the US as the Prince of Wales or Prince William or Sarah, Duchess of York.   The wedding ceremony will be in French, and not in English, which may play a role in the decision to broadcast the wedding.     The ratings for the British royal wedding were very good, considering the time and the day.   Albert's religious wedding will take place on a Saturday.

The wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier was show on American television, but some hours afterward.  The technology to show a live program from overseas largely did not exist.  The huge film reels were flown to New York for broadcast.

It is too early to know what the networks and news networks will do regarding coverage of Prince Albert's wedding. But it is unlikely that the networks will make announcements about the Monaco wedding until mid-June or thereabouts.