Do you know anyone who has watched the Winter Olympics on any of NBC’s networks this past week? If you do, you’re in the minority. These are the Olympic Games that people don’t care about.
Random, strange sports. Athletes in masks. No spectators. The Chinese Government as a backdrop. Wow, it sounds like horrible TV, and it has been.
Here’s what NBC Sports chairman Pete Bevacqua told the Hollywood Reporter about their ratings.
“For us, it’s been difficult. There’s no way around this.” ”The fact that we’ve been able to bring these Games to life during a pandemic with only a six-month window between the two [Olympics], the ratings are — of course, we always want to have the ratings better — but the ratings for these Games, as I said, are about where we thought they’d be.”
The numbers might be too horrible for NBC to admit publicly, so all we know officially is the first portion of these games has ratings far below what NBC drew in 2018.
Give Bevacqua credit for being an optimist. And he needs to be since NBC owns the Olympic broadcast rights for the next decade.
“Why I’m energized is I think about where we’re going, think about Paris and Italy and LA. And, knock on wood, not just for the Olympics, but for the sake of all of us, hopefully this pandemic is well beyond us by then, we have those spectators back in these venues bursting at the seams, we have those passionate family and friends and athletes without masks hugging each other and celebrating these Olympic achievements. We have our eye on that normalized future coming back into focus as we work our way through this pandemic, so that’s why we’re hopeful.”
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