Courtesy USA Today

(February 17, 2010) With NBC's long, current Olympic TV lock extending only to London's 2012 Summer Games, new TV deals might come this year that could lead to something not seen since the Clinton presidency: Somebody else carrying the Games.

And potential bidders for the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, and Rio de Janeiro's 2016 Summer Games — possibly including NBC, ESPN/ABC, Fox and a joint CBS/TNT bid — will scour NBC's Olympic ratings looking for clues about this: Are the Games hanging on as a TV hit?

They're giving last-place NBC much better ratings than it usually gets. And Vancouver ratings are great compared to the last go-round: NBC's primetime average — 15.1% of U.S. households — is up 15% from the 2006 Winter Games.

But Games in Torino, presenting obvious time-zone challenges, were the lowest-rated Olympics on U.S. TV since 1988. So consider a potentially more-telling comparison: Vancouver versus NBC's 2002 Salt Lake Winter Games.

Yes, Salt Lake is in America, and it got all the built-in pre-Games homecourt hype such as the national torch run.

But the two sites have time zones just an hour apart. And viewers in, say, Tampa or Toledo might not feel so much more emotionally closer to Salt Lake than to Vancouver that it would greatly affect their Olympic viewing.

By this comparison, Olympic TV's ongoing appeal looks different: Compared to NBC's Salt Lake coverage — which averaged 19.9% of U.S. TV households through its first four nights — NBC's Vancouver ratings are down 24.1%.

Meaning? Well, the ever-fracturing media landscape does make it harder to assemble mass audiences now than eight years ago. Or, maybe it means networks looking at the 2014 and 2016 Games might wonder whether their bids should be built on a different model than the NBC's Olympic game plan, which once again consists of holding the best action until primetime and slicing and dicing it — and spicing it with features — to convert sports into storylines.

blog comments powered by Disqus