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NBC Wraps Up Rio With Lowest Primetime Summer Olympic Rating Since Sydney
NBC averaged a 14.4 rating (25.4 million viewers) for 17 nights of Olympic coverage, marking the broadcast net’s lowest figure since the ’00 Sydney Games, which averaged a 13.8 rating. This year’s broadcast rating also was down 18% from the '12 London Games and down 11% from the ’08 Beijing Games. Rio also differed from ’12 in that many nights had live coverage on NBCSN or Bravo, as well as live events available digitally. NBC’s data claims the addition of this cable and digital audience to the broadcast TV audience resulted in a 7% lift. But even using NBC’s internally-created Total Audience Delivery metric, which combines all of the live primetime coverage, the audience figures would still finish over 10% behind London. NBC data shows its Total Audience Delivery average during 15 nights of competition was 27.5 million viewers. While down from recent Summer Games, NBC maintained its primetime dominance over its competitors during Rio. NBC’s primetime Rio audience also ranked higher than its 13.0 rating (22.5 million viewers) for 19 regular season NFL games last season ( Austin Karp, Assistant Managing Editor ).
