But “the way we’re watching television has changed”, said Billie Gold, vice president and director of programming research at Amplifi.
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The problems began with Friday’s opening ceremony, which was broadcast with a delay and interrupted with a series of pre-produced segments and interviews – meaning not all of the actual ceremony was shown.
With nearly a week of Olympic coverage in the bag and a few discouraging viewership trends, NBC Sports chairman Mark Lazarus hopped on the phone with reporters Thursday afternoon to reaffirm his confidence in the performance and tout the company’s “Total Audience Delivery” metric. The totals are nearly 10 percent lower than the Beijing games in 2008. But cable and streaming are up, and it mitigates that difference. Numerically, the 35.6 million everyday viewers in London Games fell to 28.6 million in Rio Games. And live-streaming represents just a tiny fraction of overall viewership, according to CNNMoney’s analysis. Viewing online is not included in the Nielsen ratings. Or skip the games and watch something on Netflix instead.
That said, I can still see the appeal of watching the Olympics on TV. The feeds I watched offered an all-around more comprehensive look at the entire event, rather than focusing nearly exclusively on USA athletes.
To date, NBC says it is averaging a 15.6 prime-time household broadcast network rating. On Wednesday night, the total was 28.6 million.
“We stream every event live”, he said.
To be sure, the streaming numbers sound impressive. That exceeds the 818 million minutes of live streaming for the entire London Games. The network has already surpassed that point in Rio.
On NBCOlympics.com and the NBC Sports app, more than 1.3 million unique users streamed the women’s gymnastics team final (3-6 p.m. ET)-which featured a dominant US victory-to rank as NBC Olympics’ best-ever Summer Games stream. A press release called it “unprecedented for an Olympics”, which is true.
Add that $30 million to the massive $1.2 billion booked prior to the Games, which Lazarus described as the most “economically successful in history”. “So by harmonizing the data, we have a measure that offers us an average minute measure of viewership”. That’s still a 7 percent drop from the same Tuesday of the London Olympics. It has added $30 million more since then. Ratings for other broadcasters and some big cable channels typically droop during the Olympics.
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United States’ Michael Phelps leaves the pool after winning a heat of the men’s 200-meter individual medley during the swimming competitions at the 2016 Summer Olympics, Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2016, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. “In some ways you could ask where are the people coming from”.
