Denver viewers watched the in Rio de Janeiro in prime time in greater numbers than in any other U.S. market except Salt Lake City, according to an released Tuesday.
Sports-loving TV watchers in Denver gave NBC’s Olympics coverage a 19.1 share, compared with Salt Lake City’s 20.4 share, for the 14 days of coverage in prime time on NBC. Share describes the percentage of viewers in the market who are watching a given television station or program.
The other top 10 markets were Indianapolis (third), Austin, Texas (fourth), Columbus, Ohio (fifth), West Palm Beach, Fla. (sixth), San Diego and Richmond, Va. (tied for seventh) and Minneapolis, St. Louis, Fort Myers, Fla., and Norfolk, Va. (tied for ninth).
Despite being mid-sized, “non-major markets,” the No. 1 and 2 ratings cities both contain large numbers of active, outdoorsy viewers, said Darrin Duber-Smith, marketing professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver.
“There’s a pent-up demand for spectator sports that people actually participate in, like swimming and running,” said Duber-Smith, who pointed to recent news of a 24/7 Rio Olympics channel as evidence. “We’re one of the most physically active markets in the country. The primary consumers of individual sports are the people who play or used to play a sport, and the Olympics are not your average spectator sports. They’re participation sports.”
NBC provided what it called “total audience delivery,” a metric that the network said considered consumption across broadcast, cable and digital streaming. Using that metric, NBC said it attracted 27.5 million viewers in prime time, ranking it as the second-highest prime-time audience for any non-U.S. Summer Games. The only Summer Games with higher viewership was the 2012 London Olympics, with 30.3 million average viewers.
However, NBC has been criticized for various aspects of its coverage — including miscalculating tape delays and the tone of some of its commentators — leading to a 17 percent decline in total viewers vs. the Summer Games in London four years ago. The drop was “even more alarmingly steep among younger demographics,” according to , at 25 percent. Broadly, television viewership has declined as more people cut cable subscriptions and move to on-demand programming available through Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu.
Still, NBC boasted some impressive numbers:
- NBC Olympics’ digital coverage included 3.3 billion total streaming minutes, 2.71 billion live streaming minutes and 100 million unique users.
- 78 percent of U.S. TV homes tuned into NBC’s Rio games coverage – which had a TV-only audience of 198 million viewers, according to national data provided by The Nielsen Company.
- The networks and digital platforms of NBCUniversal presented a record 6,755 hours of programming for the games, including its 11 broadcast networks.
Interviews with sports stars including Usain Bolt, Simone Biles, Michael Phelps and others via NBC host Bob Costas helped hold onto viewers even after the competitions ended. NBC said it will use all the data it collected to continue fine-tuning its coverage plans for Pyeongchang in 2018 and Tokyo in 2020.
This year marks the first ratings slip for NBC’s Olympics coverage since 2000, according to . NBC parent Comcast Corp. has paid $12 billion for exclusive U.S. broadcast rights to the Olympics through 2032.
