 According to the numbers Nielsen has released so far into NBC’s coverage, nobody's watching; compared to the friendly-time-zone, American-soil Salt Lake City games of 2002, viewership is way down across the board. With Michelle Kwan out, NBC is in full-on panic mode, caught in a Southwest Airlines “Want to get away?” moment. But, as usual, it’s not that simple, so it’s time to take a closer look at what we mean when we say that “nobody’s watching.”
First of all, it just isn’t true. While ratings are down significantly – by some metrics, as much as 50% -- from the Salt Lake City games, Mediaweek reports that they are in fact up from the 1998 games in Nagano, Japan. Meanwhile, thanks to an increasingly muddled prime-time schedule, in which more and more shows vie for huge ratings in short runs, February isn’t as dead a viewership time as it could have been in the past: Friday’s Opening Ceremonies went against ABC’s Dancing With The Stars, which, despite my inability to understand why, gets big numbers.
And as much as we dislike citing Tony Kornheiser for anything, it’s worth pointing out: this year, the Olympics go against American Idol, and nobody ever wins that bout. (Tony made this rather salient point last week on PTI.)
So what we’re saying is that yes, raw numbers are down, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that interest in the games has waned. Rather, those numbers speak to the inadequacies of both a NBC’s prime time strategy and Nielsen’s prime time focus. As Steve McKee points out in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, NBC’s overall insistence on airing big-time Olympic moments during prime time, on tape delay, makes sense from a particular framework: NBC bought the rights to these games more than a decade ago, long before anybody was thinking that we could all just sit online and see results posted live.
Therefore, by the logic of today’s sports marketplace, NBC massively overpaid for an event that it cannot afford to broadcast live; the conclusion that McKee does not state is that we may be looking at a broadcast rights bubble for Olympics coverage as Olympics packages in distant time zones undergo one of those lovable “value corrections” by dropping in price.
For right now, NBC has to air these events during prime time, despite our protests, because prime time still draws an overwhelmingly higher viewership rate and NBC has to pay for the package that it bought.
But it’s also fair to point out: while companies like ESPN thrive on the 18-35 year old male demographic, the Winter Olympics skew much differently. Thanks largely to the ongoing popularity of Figure Skating, women from a wide variety of age brackets make up as much as 70% of the prime time audience for NBC’s coverage.
This is something of a chicken-and-the-egg question: we could say that NBC’s coverage strategy, which is to funnel everyone towards prime time event viewership, is designed to cater to an older crowd less wired and interwebbed; we could equally say that by not embracing mobile broadcast technology, streaming video, satellite radio, or the promotional possibilities of simply releasing footage to SportsCenter, NBC is in fact writing off the biggest sports audience in America. After all, even without the dreamland of ESPN Mobile, we certainly claim to live in a sports world that operates 24 hours a day, and we’re not simply going to wait for tonight to see what happens.
So the argument twists back and forth. Let’s leave it on this note, one that explains NBC’s behavior more rationally without necessarily satisfying those of us who would actually like some live sports coverage around here somewhere: NBC is trying to rebuild a prime time empire that has slipped away. And while 18-35 year old men are huge buyers with massive spending power, women are generally more likely to watch prime time network television: NBC is hoping that they will tune in for figure skating, and stick around for Law & Order, even after the closing ceremonies.
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