Games Help NBC to Bask in the Gold

NBC’s broadcast coverage of the Summer Olympics continues to post strong ratings as the Games head through the final week, even though a disastrous response to the pay-per-view TripleCast could turn the Games into a money loser for the network.

The free prime-time coverage earned a 19.1 rating and a 36% share of the available audience over the first eight nights of the Games--about 6% higher than the rating NBC scored during the same period of the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, Korea. Viewers in about 17.6 million households nationwide have tuned in for NBC’s tape-delayed mixture of event coverage and personality profiles from Barcelona compared to 16.3 million households that watched the Seoul coverage.

Those numbers are impressive because total television viewing levels were 12% higher during the Seoul Olympics.

So far the Olympics have grabbed more viewers than its competition on CBS and ABC combined, and is just a couple of share points behind the three-network combined average of CBS, ABC and Fox. NBC estimates that more than 160 million Americans have watched all or part of the Olympic Games, and the network’s 19.1 prime-time average is 25% ahead of the 15.3 mark guaranteed to prime-time advertisers.

All potential profits are likely to be wiped out by the loss sustained on the TripleCast, however. NBC expected about 2 million homes to sign up, but only about 200,000 homes anted up the $125 fee for the pay-per-view cable service.