NBC Adds to Olympic Coverage

NBC, planning for the Athens Summer Olympics of 2004, is gearing up to add to the already-mammoth programming schedule it presented from the Sydney Games two years ago.

In Athens, the third installment of its $3.5-billion contract to televise the Games in the United States from 2000 through 2008, NBC and its cable arms, MSNBC and CNBC, figure to add slightly to the 441 1/2 hours broadcast from Sydney in 2000.

The total has not been finalized, NBC spokesman Mike McCarley said. The Aug. 13, 2004, start of the Games is 721 days away, and McCarley said, “It’s much too premature to tell but our early schedules have us doing more coverage.”

Because of the time difference from Europe, coverage will probably feature a mix of taped and live action.

In addition to the coverage on NBC, MSNBC and CNBC, Telemundo--which NBC acquired earlier this year in a $2.7-billion purchase--is due to present 90 to 100 hours of Athens 2004 coverage. “When you add in Telemundo, we’re taking the Olympics to a larger and wider audience,” McCarley said.

NBC’s ratings from Sydney resulted in the lowest marks for any Olympics, Summer or Winter, since 1968. The average Nielsen rating for the 17 nights of telecasts from Sydney was 13.8, meaning 13.8% of U.S. homes tuned in to the Games. That rating was 36% lower than the Atlanta Games, which NBC also televised.

NBC showed five hours of competition each night from Sydney; network executives said even during the 2000 Games that they had erred, that five hours nightly was too much. They also believe that staging the Games in September, as Sydney’s were, is problematic for U.S. viewers--because kids are back in school, parents are back at work after the Labor Day break and the TV schedule is full of baseball pennant races and a raft of NFL and college football games.

Moreover, virtually all of the Sydney Olympics were shown on tape delay throughout the United States--the time difference from Sydney to Los Angeles was 18 hours--and many U.S. viewers knew results long before they aired on NBC.

The time difference from Athens to Los Angeles is 10 hours. In theory, that means it would be possible to present more events live.

But, as was proven during the Salt Lake Winter Olympics earlier this year, a taped Olympics does not necessarily translate into a ratings loser.

The Salt Lake Games were broadcast on tape in Los Angeles and throughout the Pacific time zone; ratings, even on the West Coast, far surpassed the 1998 Winter Games from Nagano, Japan, which were televised by CBS.