NBC’s Olympic Games programming from Tokyo has proved a historic success.

Perhaps you’ve heard otherwise. Much reporting focused upon the decline in traditional Olympic TV ratings. On Twitter, Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi went so far as to call the precipitous viewership decline a “catastrophic” development for NBC.

Ratings still matter. But focusing narrowly on ratings mistakenly applies a 20th-century audience metric to a 21st-century event. The classic audience measurement can’t conclusively determine NBC’s success. In evaluating the Tokyo Games by traditional TV measures, critics miss NBC’s insight about how media consumption is changing.

No TV programming other than the Olympics assembles almost 17 million viewers, every night, for two weeks, as the Tokyo Games did. Even if NBC ends up re-airing ads at no charge to make up for lower-than-expected on-air ratings, network officials remained confident that the Olympics coverage would be profitable. That’s no surprise, as NBC signed up more “premium advertisers” than in 2016 and set a record in advance advertising sales, with US$1.25 billion booked before the torch was lit.

Yet broadcast television comprised only one component of NBC’s distribution mix. The Tokyo Games provided enormous amounts of video content divorced from a single channel. Americans watched on phones, on laptops, through cable partners such as NBC owner Comcast and via streaming apps – as well as on traditional broadcast TV. Viewers shared clips across social media, providing free promotion and clicks, and, though the data is not yet available, it’s likely that many purchased subscriptions directly from NBC’s Peacock TV streaming service. Streaming on the Peacock app showed a 24% rise over 2016, and at one point, the app reached its largest audience ever.

With a few rare exceptions, the Olympics have historically been profitable for U.S. broadcasters while giving viewers a glimpse of the future of media. As my research on Olympic broadcasting has detailed, media innovations that eventually become commonplace are often first introduced at the Games.

Read more:

https://theconversation.com/beyond-the-ratings-nbcs-olympics-telecast-showed-videos-future-165856