Viewers streamed 883 million live minutes of the 2016 Rio Olympics through Tuesday. As of Day 5, it had surpassed 1 billion live-streaming minutes: an Olympics record, and significantly larger than the streaming for the entire London Olympics.
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RATINGS: NBC had its best night of the Rio Olympics on Tuesday, registering 33.4 million viewers for a broadcast that included live coverage of Phelps winning his 20th and 21st gold medals and the dominating performance of the US women’s gymnastics team.
One week into the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro it looks as though, despite being in a more favourable time zone, U.S. television viewers are not tuning in to the extent they did for the London Games in 2012.
Michael Socolow, a University of ME professor of communications and author of a book on the 1936 Berlin Games, said NBC is doing a disservice to viewers by delaying broadcasts of key events.
Finally, regardless of how a rating compares to London or previous Games, 36.1 million viewers is huge for a Tuesday night in August. Tuesday night’s audience of 33.4 million even bested three NFL Playoff games from this past season.
The company had sold $1.2 billion worth of ad time on its TV networks and digital outlets before the Games in Rio opened last Friday.
If NBC falls short of the ratings goal, it will have to give advertisers free commercials to make up the difference. “Yes, they want to get us in the range of what we promised them by piece, but it’s really the mix of assets and getting in front of the Olympic audience”. Here’s how you can stream the big event in Rio using your mobile device. It added an additional $30 million since the competition started, Lazarus said on Thursday.
“The public is now to the point where if they want to watch the Olympics, they want to see competition”.
NBCUniversal, parent of the NBC broadcast channel and several cable networks, made a profit of roughly $120 million from the 2012 Olympics in London, the company previously said. Even in a down year for NBC and the Olympics, every other sport not named the National Football League would do anything to trade places with them.
NBC says the total audience delivery (TAD) component has lifted primetime viewership by at least 7 percent each night. That is still the case, Lazarus said.
Another caveat: Because every event is streamed live, the tape-delayed, prime-time broadcasts of showcases such as the star-studded women’s gymnastics lose some of their luster.
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The week’s only other programs to average more than 8 million viewers were the season finale of the ABC dating series, “The Bachelorette”, sixth for the week, averaging 8.58 million and “The Bachelorette: After The Final Rose”, which followed and was seventh for the week, averaging 8.11 million.
