An average of 11.4 million viewers watched the Beijing Olympics every night on NBC Universal platforms — the smallest prime-time audience ever for any of the Winter Games and a far cry from the 19.8 million nightly viewers for the Pyeongchang Games in 2018.
More than two weeks of coverage, starting with the frigid opening show on Feb. 4 and ending on Sunday, drew a total of 160 million viewers on the NBC television channel, the Peacock streaming service and other platforms, NBC Universal said Monday.
Dramatic storylines proliferated during NBC Universal’s 2,800 hours of coverage, but few suited an audience that might crave escapist jaunts and triumphal stories. Pandemic restrictions forced the leagues to take place in a bubble. The result: mostly empty booths, and NBC announcers like Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski having to deliver their messages from a compound in Connecticut.
Some of the most memorable episodes lacked the uplifting, inspiring qualities that make for blockbuster Olympic broadcasts. Mikaela Shiffrin, an American skier who had won three Olympic medals before arriving in Beijing, stumbled disastrously in several events and went home empty-handed. Kamila Valieva, the 15-year-old Russian figure skater, fell apart on her free skate while enduring a doping scandal. As she stepped off the ice, her coach scolded her for the camera.
Geopolitical tensions also continued to haunt the Olympics. China tried to rid the Games of political undertones using bots and fake accounts. And concerns over the welfare of Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai, who last year accused a political official of sexual abuse, threatened to overshadow the Games.
Closing the Games
“The Olympics brand is really struggling. A lot of people don’t feel that emotional connection anymore,” said Tang Tang, a media professor at Kent State University who has studied the Olympics.
The Beijing Olympics lacked the kind of powerhouse story that made American swimmer Michael Phelps and his eight gold medals a TV watcher in 2008. One of the breakthrough stars of this year’s Games, Chinese-American skier Eileen Gu, competed for China before the United States. And players in the National Hockey League didn’t compete.
“The public looks to the Olympics for the stories. They need that superhero story, that star quality,” Professor Tang said. “They don’t really see the Olympics as a real sporting event, but rather as something more personal.”
In 2014, NBC Universal bought the US rights to broadcast the Olympics until 2032 for $7.75 billion. But the Beijing Games, and the Tokyo Games six months earlier, were logistically challenging. The Tokyo Olympics drew the smallest crowd since NBCUniversal began covering the Summer Games in 1988.
In Beijing, NBC Universal struggled with a 13-hour time difference with New York, which meant that social media and news stories usually delivered Olympic results long before viewers watched a broadcast. The company said this year’s Olympics were the most streamed Winter Games ever, with 4.3 billion minutes streamed across digital and social media.
Well before this month, NBC Universal had told advertisers to expect lower ratings for the Beijing Games than for the Pyeongchang event. The company said Monday that coverage in Beijing had surpassed everything on prime-time television except the NFL
The biggest night for this year’s Games was on February 13, when 24 million people tuned in, many of them likely from NBC Universal’s Super Bowl broadcast. The football game attracted 112 million viewers, or 70 percent of the total number of viewers who watched the Olympics for more than two weeks.
