NBC partners with ice dancing to skate to ratings win
Even with the non-manly sport of ice dancing dominating NBC’s Monday night prime-time coverage (sprinkled in with a little men’s aerials and some snippets of women’s hockey), the Olympics out-drew a two-hour first-run episode of “The Bachelor” on ABC and a new episode of Fox’s “24” (Jack Bauer might want to try using a skate blade as a secret weapon).
The U.S. didn’t win any gold medals to draw in extra viewers, but 21 million were watching the Olympics versus 11.2 million for “The Bachelor” during the 8- to-10 p.m. block and 8.7 million for the one-hour “24,” according to NBC and Nielsen Media Research.
So far, NBC is averaging 25.5 million viewers a night, the most for a non-U.S.-based Winter Olympics since the 1994 Games that were dominated by coverage of the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan knee-whacking scandal.
NBC has taken some criticism for shoving the highly anticipated USA-Canada hockey game Sunday to less widely available MSNBC -- but it was shown live in all time zones and drew 8.22 million viewers to become the second-most-watched program in the history of the network. Only the 2008 presidential election night coverage did better -- 8.23 million.
According to Nielsen’s numbers, NHL regular-season hockey on the Versus cable network last season averaged about 250,000 viewers. But NBC’s broadcast of Game 7 of the Pittsburgh Penguins-Detroit Red Wings Stanley Cup final averaged 8 million viewers on NBC.
Meanwhile, some viewers were disappointed to discover Sunday that their cable or satellite carriers (DirecTV, for example) don’t carry the high-definition version of MSNBC.
Thankfully for them, Wednesday’s U.S.-Switzerland hockey quarterfinal set for noon PST will be shown on NBC instead of MSNBC -- though it will be live only in the East and Central time zones. Pacific time zone viewers will get it at 3 p.m.
Even better news? The game will be available live through streaming video on NBCOlympics.com. Because that hits during the West Coast workday, the website also offers the “boss” button. You click it and the game disappears from your computer screen and a spreadsheet comes up while the sound automatically turns off.
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