Winter Olympics
Winter Olympics – Some 138 million people have watched the first five days of the Vancouver games on NBC Universal’s networks — a 22 percent increase on average viewership at the same stage of the last Winter Olympics in Torino in 2006.
Fox television’s ratings juggernaut “American Idol” stole some of NBC’s thunder on Tuesday night, beating its prime-time Olympics coverage into second place by about 23.6 million to 20.3 million viewers, according to early data on Wednesday.
But for NBC, which has said it will lose about $250 million on televising the Vancouver games, the payoff could come later if Americans get back into the forgotten habit of simply turning on NBC for its prime-time shows.
NBC paid a record $2.2 billion in 2003 for the U.S. broadcast rights to the 2010 and 2012 Olympics — before the slump in the advertising market and its own ratings slide.
Keith Sherin, the chief financial officer of NBC parent the General Electric Co, has said ad sales for Vancouver will be $650 million to $700 million. That’s in line with Torino in 2006, which cost less for the network to air.
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