RATINGS for NBC’s Olympic coverage fizzled by the second day of the Sydney games, according to early Nielsen estimates.
In an era when the games’ results are broadcast over the Internet 15-hours before they air in the U.S., it looks like NBC’s plan to air the games on a tape delay may be starting to take its toll on the telecast’s ratings.
After scoring a huge audience for Friday’s opening ceremonies (with a 16.1 rating, NBC estimates that about 56 million people watched all or part of the broadcast), the ratings for Saturday’s prime time coverage of actual competition slipped to a 13.6 – the lowest rating for any single night of Summer Olympic coverage since the 1970s.
The early ratings, based on what Nielsen calls its “fast nationals” are difficult to translate into a solid audience size. Even less reliable are Sunday night’s Olympic ratings, which did better than Saturday’s with a 15 rating, according to Nielsen.
Each ratings point represents about 1 million homes.
These ratings are subject to change when Nielsen calculates and releases its more reliable national ratings later this week.
To be fair, the ratings for NBC’s Saturday Olympic telecast still beat the combined ratings of CBS, FOX and ABC in the all important 18-to-49 demographic prized by advertisers.
Yesterday, NBC also claimed that about 111 million viewers tuned in to see all or part of the telecasts during the games’ first three days.
NBC Sports chief Dick Ebersol has continually downplayed potential ill effects of the time-delay.
“The Olympics are a visual experience much more than a results experience,” Ebersol said last week.
“The human drama of these people, the journey that they go through, is equally as compelling (as) the results.”
Meanwhile, after paying nearly $3 billion for the rights to air the games through 2008, NBC officials have claimed that the network raked in $900 million in ad revenues for the Sydney games – about $120 million more than originally projected.
But that jackpot may already be in jeopardy.
As with all network programming, NBC has promised its Olympic advertisers that their commercials would reach a certain number of people.
If the network fails, it may be forced to offer its sponsors “give backs” or “make-goods” – free advertising time on other parts of its prime time schedule.
In this case, NBC officials have predicted that the games will score an average rating of between 17.5 to 18.5 and reach more than 215 million viewers between the opening and closing ceremonies.
Olympic sources said NBC doesn’t begin to get into trouble with its advertisers unless the telecast’s overall ratings dip below a 16.1 – and even then there’s room for negotiation. “It’s not so black and white,” the source said.
