Last night’s NBC‘s primetime broadcast of the London Olympics featured featured Michael Phelps’ 22nd Olympic medal (gold in the 4×100-meter individual medley), drew 28.0 million viewers, the lowest to date for the current Games. Viewership
was off 11.4% from the comparable night at the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing (31.6 million). NBC noted that particular night included live coverage of Phelps winning his record eighth gold medal of the Beijing Games and Dara Torres at age 41 winning a silver medal in the 50-meter freestyle. That same night in Beijing also covered Usain Bolt’s record-setting gold medal in the 100-meter. NBC’s primetime Olympics coverage (8:30-11:15 p.m. ET/PT) earned a 15.9/26 national rating/share, 17% higher than the comparable night at the 2004 Athens Olympics (13.6/28), the last European Olympics, but down from the comparable night in Beijing (17.8/32), the fourth highest-rated night of competition for those Games. Last night’s viewership was 24% higher than the comparable night at the 2004 Athens Olympics (22.5 million).
Related: NBC London Olympics’ 34.5M Average Viewers Over 8 Nights Marks Yet Another 36-Year High
Through the first nine days, NBC’s coverage of the London Summer Olympics has reached nearly 195 million total viewers, averaging 33.9 million nightly primetime viewers and a household rating of 18.9/32. If the trend continues, the London Games is expected to become the most-watched event in U.S. television history, surpassing the high of 215 million viewers that tuned in for the Beijing Olympics. The 195 million total viewers is nearly 18 million more than Athens through the same period (176.9 million).
NBC’s daily average of 33.9 million viewers is the most of any non-U.S. Summer Games since the 1976 Montreal Olympics. It’s also 3.7 million more than Beijing (30.2 million) and 7.7 million more than Athens (26.2 million). The nine-night average household rating of 18.9/32 is the best for any non-U.S. Summer Olympics since the 1976 Montreal Olympics. The 18.9/32 is 9% higher than the first nine nights from Beijing (17.4/30), and 20% higher than the first nine nights from Athens (15.8/28), the last European Summer Olympics.
Related: Olympics Also Boost NBC’s Internet And Mobile App Traffic
Separately, the BBC’s coverage of Mo Farah’s 10,000-meter gold medal triumph peaked at 17.1 million viewers across BBC One and BBC Olympics 1, the highest yet except for the Opening Ceremony’s 22.4 million. The climax of the Heptathlon attracted an audience of 16.3 million at its peak as Jess Ennis took the gold. For the Long Jump, 15.6 million tuned in at the peak when Greg Rutherford claimed Team Great Britain’s first gold in the category since 1964. BBC Sport Online yesterday attracted 7.4 million UK users and 9.6 million global.


These people suck…… Anyone that knows anything about sports would undetstand that viewers want to see events live… Not what some executive choses to show you…on some chosen time frame. Duh……. !!!
I agree! It would be so much nicer if you could tune in live to see your favorite events, even if it would take a lot more channels. Even when I try not to see the outcomes, I usually stumble across them anyway. Also, if we were watching live, I wouldn’t have to keep being interrupted with cuts from other inverviews and competitions I do not care about. This five hour feed NBC is running every night is a pain in the bottom. I have to record it and then flip through to the parts that are interesting to me. Thank goodness I live in the age of the DVR!
Boycott NBC. Let’s run them out of business!!! They are so hated by the public that this would actually work in a short amount of time.
You are either kidding, or you are delusional. Run NBC out of business. LOLOLOLOL. Good luck with that.
It’s kinda hard NOT to watch the coverage. On cable, the Olympics is on more channels than you would think possible. It’s everywhere, so of course a lot of folks are watching.
How can one avoid it?
I missed the event because I never knew when anything wAS COMING ON. NBC has a monopoly on the Olympics where else can you watch anything. NBC thinks they own it and us. I refused to watch NBC make the whole thing a liberal political lecture.
Yeah, it’s easy to get a record when you refuse to broadcast them at any other time to artificially increase your prime time ratings, and make it almost impossible to watch the games online.
That is why people are being FORCED to watch taped events. So NBC could create the ratings and pat itself on the back trying to convince itself they are doing a good job. That is why I have refused to watch a minute of the Olympics. That and the farce that the IOC has become. The coverage since NBC has taken over is horrible.
If the Olympics were next door I would not watch. Most of the events are meaningless, and the bonehead at NBC that decided to delay broadcasts should be fired.
I am sick and tired hearing of and seeing him, Michael Phelps, every time I turn on the TV to see what is going on in London. He is way overexposed worse than Obama in fact. Mr. Costas gets on my nerves, talk about lack of personality. Overall the reportage is greatly lacking in quality. Every night they all wallow in the previous day’s events, it is really boring. Some of the comments from some of the reporters during an event, for example, road racing, are so dumb that it makes my skin crawl. Just shut up and let us watch in peace and if something really needs a comment, make it brief and intelligent.
NBC has done an awful job. Horrible. You would think the games were about Michael Phelps. The games… ALL OF THEM… should have been LIVE on the four NBC channels that I PAY FOR!
I stopped watching NBC or anyone, do Olympics when they refused to air the shooting sports. What 1990?
Turn off the TV or turn the channel. I’m quite sure it’s possible.
yawn*
My phone already alerted me to the results a day earlier.
Someone needs to notify NBC before they run their repeat episode of Live Olympics.
This is ridiculous. The most watched television ever? Hardly, not even close. It may be the most watched Olympics to date, but that isn’t saying much.
The most watched television event in history was Elvis Presley’s Aloha from Hawaii, the first satellite broadcast. Filmed in the early morning, it was delayed broadcast to different time zones around the globe. Over 70% of the televisions in the world turned on that show when it was broadcast in their time zone. That’s an audience numbering in the billions.
The Olympics, or any other sports event, even the Super Bowl, will never get more than a fraction of a percent of that audience.
Elvis was and remains the King. No one will ever be that big again. Certainly not some swimmer.
“No one will ever be that big again. Certainly not some swimmer.”
Good thing, too … he’d sink to the bottom of the pool!
I don’t mind the tape delay – I get that…but WHY do they have to show the big races/events so LATE? why not put it at a respectable hour? good grief.. his race didn’t air until almost 11 – no wonder it had low ratings… everyone was too tired to stay awake.
Watching a taped replay of a earlier sporting event produces the same thrill and degree of interest as kissing your sister…. Sorry NBC, I opted for reading the results in the paper and on the Internet sites….
Unfortunately, I hear the results before they are shown on TV. This even happens on local and national NBC affiliates. This really makes me disgusted with NBC’s approach to these games. I hope they lose the bid the next time it comes up because I am sick of watching action taht took place hours before that most of the rest of the world already is aware of.
I think just about every show is ‘the most watched event in television history’ nowadays.
Yawn.
The coverage by NBC is terrible. They show 5 minutes of the Olympics (sometimes) then 5 minutes of commercials. The longest event they can even follow is a 3 or 4 minute race. And I don’t know about you, but their constant interviewing of ‘Olympic Stars’ gets rather tedious, especially when they show it a second time. I sure hope the advertisers know how bad it is, because I won’t even watch the commercials.
I watched every bit I could. I watch the Olympics every four years without fail. Gone are the days of Jim McKay. Their is something wrong withe the formatting, not doubt.
We were watching McKayla Maroney and the Fing commentator kept saying she’s a shoo-in for gold, can’t loose. We wanted to strangle him if we got close.I told my wife he’s jinxing her.BANG, she falls on her butt. To many talking heads trying to fill air space that didn’t need filling.
nbc is fortunate to have the Olympics – people are certainly not watching because it’s nbc.
nbc has lost all credibility, proven to be devoid of integrity or anything approaching professional ethics, they’ve been inept and their decision making questionable – and that was before the opening ceremony (as bad as it was, the mindless ramblings of the nbc ‘hosts’ finally forced me to turn to something else). Is there a single person in that organization that has any integrity at all?
The coverage has been crap, there’s no other way to put it – it’s an embarrassment. The delay is one thing, and it’s bad enough but the utterly moronic commentary of the nbc twits has been painful to watch or listen too. The halfwit bobble head with 2 gallons of bondo on her face doing the swimming interviews is probably the worst… after the first few I saw her do I started turning the moment the race finished – you could tell even the athletes she was interviewing in some cases were thinking ‘My God, are you really this stupid?’. Although, she is certainly not alone – nbc has just become a joke – like most of the media, they’re just the worst of the worst. Even their commercials have been stupid and annoying.
I stopped watching last week – I support the guys and gals and I usually watch religiously but I just cannot stomach nbc or their mindless lemmings anymore. Good riddance!
after about 15 minutes attempting to get online, I gave up . the login page would not display login in entries like name and psswrd.
Tried the next day same… what is up with this years olympics???
really frustrating.
Fight tape with tape I always say. I just record everything on my DVR and FF through all the commercials and horrible interviews. You can finish 8 hours of Olympics coverage in about 2 hours after skipping all the fluff…If they are not going to show it live then why should I waste my time watching the commercials…
I think the reason why so many viewers are tuning into the live, er, ahem, “tape delayed” broadcasts, even when they know the outcome (thanks to Social Media, other Network and Cable channel announcements, ESPN, Fox Sports, etc.) is because they WANT to SEE the event. I tuned into NBC’s Prime Time Snorefest’s to see specific events that interested me, only to realize that I would have to (literally) wade through Water Polo or Beach Volleyball to see my desired competitions. I missed Usain Bolt’s record run last night because Volleyball ran on and on and put me to sleep. SUCKS!!
PATHETIC.
A bunch of morons running or swimming really fast is the most watch event in history, while we land a fucking TANK with fucking LAZERS on another damn PLANET a quarter of a billion miles away to further the exploration and advancement of ALL MANKIND and it barely gets noticed or broadcast. Fucking DISGUSTING.
I am so damn sick and tired of seeing and hearing about Michael Phelps that I can’t stand it. It’s even worse than all the news (at the time) on whether Bret Farve was going to retire, or not.
How about maybe 5 swimming events, not 50. For God’s sake, how many events was Phelps in? 50?
It would be like track and field having 10 meter, 20 meter, 30 meter, etc up to 10,000 meters forwards, backwards, sideways, and one at a time, two at a time or 4 at a time.