Of course, with almost a dozen channels playing some Olympics coverage and an ambitious online presence, those broadcast primetime numbers are not the only criteria NBC want to be judged by – by either viewers or advertisers who see Rio lagging behind the big success of London. Adding those viewers to NBC’s total brings it to 34 million watching the Olympics on Sunday evening.
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During Friday night’s opening ceremony of the Games, viewers took to social media to voice their anti-advertising sentiments as many felt the broadcast was inundated with more ads than Olympians.
In Australia, Channel Seven’s broadcast of the Rio opening ceremony averaged 1.61 million metropolitan viewers – down from the 1.7 million who watched the London 2012 opening ceremony.
The Summer Olympics opening ceremony had 26.5 million viewers, according to Nielsen company figures released Tuesday.
Saturday’s prime-time coverage averaged 20.63 million viewers, 28.1 percent less than the record 28.72-million average for the first Saturday of competition in the 2012 Games.
NBC continues to crush all other broadcast network programming, as is customary for the Olympics during TV’s August dog days.
NBC began live-streaming Olympics competition in 2008 with the Summer Games in Beijing.
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About 31.5 million people tuned in on TV and online to watch the Olympics on Monday night, about the same number as those who watched only on TV fours years ago, the Comcast Corp. -owned network said Tuesday in a statement. This is the first Olympics in which the NBC Sports app will deliver live video through these connected devices. NBC’s 18-to-49 rating was a 9.9 – runner-up ABC had a 0.7. The averages for 8 to 11 p.m.: NBC with 33.6 million, CBS with 4.3 million, ABC with 2.5 mllion, Univision with 1.6 million, Telemundo with 1.5 million, Ion with 1.3 million, Fox with 993,000 and The CW with 931,000. In short what viewers wanted was more live events, less advertising and less chatter.
