BERLIN — Track officials are considering finals and semifinals only during shorter evening sessions at major events from 2011, attempting to make the sport more attractive to television audiences.

Packaging the prime-time sessions into a friendlier television format was one of the themes covered Sunday at the council meeting of the International Association of Athletics Federations.

"We have to see how to make better presentation of our world championships," IAAF president Lamine Diack said after the meeting. "You should not expect a revolution, but we have to satisfy the spectators and the television."

The IAAF is negotiating new television rights with the European Broadcasting Union.

"These are slight but important changes," said Bob Hersh, an IAAF vice president and chairman of its competition commission. The proposals are expected to be adopted at the IAAF congress in August.

World indoor championships will have no finals on Friday, the first day of the competition, Hersh said. The evening sessions will be 3 hours long on Saturday and Sunday and limited only to finals, plus semifinals in the 60-meter sprints and 60-meter hurdles, he said.

"This will make it more attractive to audiences in the stadium and to television," Hersh said. "It is not the best way to present our sport by having sessions that last 5 hours or longer."

Such a timetable will be used for the first time at the next indoor worlds in 2011 in Doha, Qatar. The first outdoor championships would use it that year in Daegu, South Korea.

It will not be adopted for this year's outdoor championships in Berlin from Aug. 15-23, though the schedule there will have fewer heats during the evenings.

Evening sessions at world outdoor championships will be limited to a maximum of 3 hours and will also consist only of finals and semifinals. Qualifying heats will be in the morning. The first day would have no finals, except for perhaps a marathon.

"It is hard to reduce the number of days and not cut the number of events at the same time, and we did not want to cut events," Hersh said.

There had been calls to reduce the outdoor championships, which remain a nine-day event, to six days. There are 47 finals at track and field championships.

"We are still looking at these changes, but we are well along the way," Hersh said.

There are also plans to give meets a "cleaner appearance" by removing some non-essential officials and non-competitors from the field, he said.

"We are competing with entertainment and we are trying to find a model timetable that will make our product more entertaining," Hersh said.

The changes will not apply, for now, to the track schedule at the Olympics because of different television requirements, he said.

When the IAAF Diamond League of one-day meets is launched in 2010 to replace the current Golden League, its timetable will be compressed into a television-friendly, 2-hour format.

The series will have at least 12 stops on three continents, with three more cities on standby.

The IAAF also plans to start using video distance measuring for long jump and triple jump at Doha in 2011. The system will be demonstrated in Berlin, although it will not be in official use.

The council also awarded the 2010 cross-country world championships to the Polish city of Bydgoszcz, to be held on March 27. Bydgoszcz was the only candidate.