NEW YORK Over the course of the last week, Beijing's Olympic Park has pulled double-duty, functioning as a proving ground for the world's top athletes and a research laboratory for NBC Universal. And while the XXIX Olympiad has offered a seemingly endless succession of shocking and memorable moments, NBC officials say they aren't at all surprised by what they've discovered on the ratings front.
Speaking to reporters at 2 a.m. Thursday (Beijing time), NBC Olympics president Gary Zenkel said that the 2008 Games have reaffirmed the strength of broadcast television, even in an era of hyper-accelerated fragmentation. If anything, nonlinear platforms seem to have helped build up NBC's Olympics audience, he said.
"The numbers are astounding, and we're fairly certain that multiplatform distribution throughout the day is essentially fueling that interest and driving viewers over to share in the Olympics in prime time," Zenkel said. "People are gathering in front of their TV sets in greater numbers than ever."
Case in point: On Tuesday night, an estimated 40 million viewers tuned in to watch U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps set the all-time record for individual gold medal victories. In aggregate, some 82 million people plugged into the broadcast on the night of the 12th, giving NBC its highest-rated night of Games coverage thus far.
Across all media, the ratings have been even more impressive. Giving the press its first look at NBC's TAMi numbers, NBC Universal research president Alan Wurtzel revealed that on Sunday, some 107.4 million viewers watched Olympics coverage on the broadcast net and the NBCU family of cable channels (USA Network, Bravo, MSNBC, etc.). When Internet, mobile and video-on-demand platforms were thrown into the mix, the number of exposures grew to just north of 113 million, Wurtzel said.
Pulling together proprietary data from the likes of Nielsen Media Research, Omniture (Web) and Rentrak (VOD), TAMi, or the Total Audience Measurement Index, is the culmination of NBC's early efforts to measure all media exposure. Stacking digital data atop the broad base of TV viewership, the resulting pyramid looks a bit like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, with broadcast functioning as the bedrock upon which the rest of the platforms are built. (Narrowing upward with online and mobile usage, the pyramid tapers off at the top with the Games' tiny VOD audience.)
Through Monday, August 11, TV has accounted for slightly less than 94 percent of NBCU's total Olympics audience, and while the digital numbers are relatively small, they are additive. On the day after NBCU's TV numbers hit their high-water mark, some 94.8 million people watched Olympics coverage on the tube. And while linear viewing dropped slightly, office drones looking to get their fix on Monday afternoon helped lift online exposure to 7.81 million uniques, accounting for 7.6 percent of the day's total.
Monday night's 4x100 freestyle relay, which saw Jason Lezak secure victory for the U.S. men's swim team over a mouthy French squad, has been NBC's most-viewed online video from the Beijing Games thus far, according to Wurtzel. The race was watched on NBC by a live audience of 81 million people; another 1.7 million accessed the race via online video.
Wurtzel said that the relay was particularly interesting in light of how many people elected to share the video with friends. Some 1.5 million streams were shared, which speaks to the power of the Olympics as a community event.
Continue to next page →
