The 2022 Winter Olympics are underway, and medals will soon begin to be handed out. But will the Beijing Games earn a gold medal in TV ratings for NBC? Yes and no.
From Friday through Sunday, Feb. 20, NBC should dominate television with the cold-weather global competition. But that doesn’t mean the expensive sporting event will be a smashing success for a network that paid a ski-slope-high $7.75 billion in 2014 for the rights to air the Olympics in the U.S. through 2032. At least not if recent TV ratings trends — especially for the Olympics — are any indication.
To begin with, the Winter Olympics have never been as popular as the Summer Games, and it is generally fair to only compare the TV ratings for like-events. But a key comparison — and glaring concern — this time around will be the Tokyo Summer Olympics, which were originally scheduled for 2020 but delayed to last summer due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Tokyo Games averaged 12.5 million primetime viewers, which is a very nice number these days in broadcast TV. Considering recent history, however, that tally wouldn’t turn any heads.
Like last summer’s Tokyo games, the Beijing Olympics will have little-to-no live attendance, which hurts the television-viewer experience, and thus, the average TV viewership itself. The time zone is also comparable to last year’s Summer Games: Tokyo is 14 hours ahead of Eastern standard time (and 17 hours ahead of PT), while Beijing is 13 hours ahead of EST. That means events are happening well outside U.S. primetime hours, requiring NBC to stream them live and play recaps during its main viewership periods.
Those are both big negatives. Also a big negative? The actual ratings declines for the Tokyo event. The primetime viewership for the 2020/2021 Games shrunk 47%, or by nearly half, from the directly Rio Summer Olympics in 2016.
Rio de Janeiro, which averaged 23.5 million total viewers per night, is just two hours ahead of EST, making the programming of primetime here in the U.S. pretty seamless. The closer time zone also removes (or at least, mitigates) the spoiler factor that existed in Tokyo and will exist for Beijing. Just like this past summer, over the next two-plus weeks, viewers in the States will (or could easily) know who won most of the competitions before they are repackaged for primetime.
Some of those most ambitious (or anxious, or spoiler-wary) viewers will watch the victories unfold live at weird hours on Peacock, NBCUniversal’s paid streaming service that will carry every Beijing event live. Peacock similarly streamed many sports in Tokyo, but it wasn’t exactly a smashing success. The awareness of the service was low and the execution of the livestream wasn’t exactly podium material either. NBCU executives have promised a better experience this time around.
As it did in Tokyo, NBC’s broadcast network — still the more popular option for tune-in — will carry some coverage of Beijing events throughout the workday. But even there, the network has seen an erosion of interest. For the entire 24-hour day, viewership of the Tokyo Games was down 35% from Rio. A loss of one-third is better than a loss of one-half, but the biggest advertising bucks are in the after-dinner hours.
Below, we’ve charted the past 10 years of the Olympics, both Winter and Summer, by Nielsen’s “total day” (6 a.m. to 6 a.m.) viewership and primetime viewership. We did not bother including delayed viewing as that would only add a few hundred thousand more viewers (at most) for even the biggest live sporting events.
As you can see, ratings for the most recent Winter Games (Vancouver, Sochi, Pyeongchang) and the Summer Games (London, Rio, Tokyo) have naturally trended downward over the last decade. But the roughest drops were due to the same global pandemic that Beijing faces.
Here, we should spell out the time zones: Vancouver is on Pacific Time, which is 3 hours behind EST, and had some of the highest viewership of any recent Olympics. London is 5 hours ahead of EST, and is the clear ratings winner of this bunch. As for the last two Winter Games, Sochi, Japan, is 8 hours ahead of EST and Pyeongchang, South Korea, is 14 hours ahead of ET.
Given the trend lines and the challenges of these Beijing games, NBC should be thrilled with a bronze in the ratings.
