With only a week to go, NBC's TV ratings for the Winter Olympics are down 7 percent, while its streaming numbers are through the roof.
With 1.31 billion live streaming minutes through Sunday at NBCOlympics.com, NBC Sports Digital has more than tripled the 420 million minutes for the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Meanwhile, the network's prime-time coverage on TV drew a 12.0 rating over the first 11 days, off 7 percent from a 12.9 rating for the Winter Games in Russia. The prime-time total audience delivery average of 21.3 million viewers also was off 7 percent, from 22.9 million for the first 11 days.
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Given the dip in NFL and entertainment TV ratings over the last couple of years, the network baked in an expected decrease in Olympics numbers, according to NBC Sports boss Mark Lazarus.
"We anticipated some drop-off in audience from four years ago, and if you look across the entire media landscape, if you were down 6 percent, and that’s only prime time, let me remind you," Lazarus said during a conference call last week. "Some of our other day parts are overdelivering, and that helps get us closer to our guarantees, and our total consumption will be up."
The network expects to fulfill its commitments to Olympic advertisers, therefore avoiding having to cough up "make good," or free, ads for audience shortfalls. Olympic coverage on NBC and NBCSN has routinely doubled or tripled the numbers of competitors, according to the network.
NBC has delivered some sensational sports TV moments from South Korea, in my book. If U.S. figure skaters have been somewhat disappointing, snowboarders have come to the forefront.
The debut of women's big air as an Olympic event generated some hair-raising TV Sunday night, with U.S. snowboarders Jamie Anderson, Julia Marino and Hailey Langland throwing down the kind of eye-popping flips that were missing from the previous windblown slopestyle competition that should have been rescheduled.
"Women's snowboarding is incredible right now," said NBC snowboarding analyst Todd Richards during Sunday's coverage. "It's one of my favorite things to watch at any of these events because it's seeing a flash of progression that we haven't seen in snowboarding in a very long time. It's great to watch."
From launch to landing, Julia Marino's first Big Air run was a sight to see. #WinterOlympics pic.twitter.com/fYwxdSjRmm
— NBC Olympics (@NBCOlympics) February 19, 2018
Star power still draws, too. It's no coincidence NBC's viewership peaked at 20.7 million Sunday night when Alpine standouts Lindsey Vonn and Mikaela Shiffrin were on the slopes for downhill training runs around 9 p.m. ET.
The previous gold-medal performances by American snowboarders Red Gerard and Chloe Kim were also great TV. Both are the kind of fresh-faced teenagers that Americans love to root for come Olympic time.
As with any Olympics, NBC has had to deal with some self-inflicted wounds as well as plain old bad luck.
It had to drop-kick opening ceremonies analyst Joshua Cooper Ramo after he stupidly said Koreans were thankful to the Japanese — conveniently ignoring Imperial Japan's iron-fisted rule over the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945. The network also apologized to the Olympic home country for the slight.
Coming into Pyeongchang, Shiffrin was the most heavily marketed U.S. athlete. Weather issues forced the cancellation and rescheduling of multiple events, so that when she won gold in the women's slalom, the victory came around 12:40 a.m. ET. That was nearly two hours past NBC's prime-time window on the East Coast.
NBC got more bad news when Shiffrin announced she was pulling out of the downhill final. It was hoping for a TV-friendly head-to-head matchup between Shiffrin and Vonn: the two Olympic golden girls of Madison Avenue. But that's history now.
Still, NBC has a powerhouse Olympic lineup Tuesday night, with Vonn going for gold in the downhill, Gerard competing in men's big air and coverage of the ladies’ figure skating short program. There's also still to come the gold medal women's hockey game between the United States and Canada, and the U.S. men's hockey team is still in contention, too.
