Saturday’s broadcast numbers follow an opening ceremony Friday night that was the lowest rated for a Summer Olympics since the 1992 games in Atlanta. (The runner-up? Athens 2004, which averaged a 14.6 rating.) Worse, the 13.9 rating is just barely ahead of the average edition of NBC’s Sunday Night Football last fall (12.9) rating. The stars aligned for NBC on Sunday, with Phelps and Ledecky in gold medal-winning swims that were aired live, and a dominating performance by the gymnasts.
Advertisement
DOUBLE-FAULTS: NBC’s prime-time broadcast had some significant internal competition Sunday, with tennis stars Novak Djokovic and the doubles team of Venus and Serena Williams getting knocked out of the Olympics in matches shown on Bravo. Hicks said it was impossible to tell Hosszu’s story without citing the work of coach Shane Tusup. Moments later, cameras caught the frightening wipeout of Dutch rider Annemiek van Vleuten, the race’s leader at the time. Cable subscribers can also use the NBC Sports Live streaming service to watch games and coverage from the Rio Olympics.
What they got was a one-hour tape delay so NBC could try and shovel as many advertisements at consumers as possible (under the guise of needing to add “context”), and some incoherent rambling from hosts that often went hysterically out of their way to avoid addressing any of the volatile realities surrounding the games in Rio.
On the first night of competition at the Rio Olympics on Saturday, the network recorded about 19.5million viewers between the hours of 8pm and 11pm.
The Peacock also touted its digital numbers as the best ever for Olympics coverage, no surprise given the heightened emphasis on streaming options this time out.
Sunday’s Olympic coverage on the networks of NBCUniversal was watched by 93.2 million viewers (31.4% of the U.S. population) in 51.2 million homes (44.3% of U.S. TV households). NBC pays about $1 billion every two years for its Olympics TV rights, and made about $120 million in profit during the London games.
Advertisement
LOOKAHEAD: Men’s gymnastics is expected to dominate NBC’s Monday coverage.
