Never Mind the Grousing: NBC Touts Olympics as TV Everywhere Success

August 6, 2012 · Posted in M&E Daily, Today's M&E Connections 

Online grousing over NBC’s Olympics coverage hasn’t hurt TV ratings: to the contrary, the network averaged a record 35.8 million viewers during broadcasts of the London games’ first weekend (as reported by the Daily Beast). Likewise, despite rumblings about restricted online access to NBC’s live Olympics coverage, the network is reporting an unprecedented number of online and mobile device “verifications” for Olympics programming through the NBCOlympics.com site as well as the NBC Olympics Live Extra app.

All told, the roughly 100 million cable, satellite, and telco households in the U.S. have verified 7.6 million devices with NBC — an increase of 1 million devices since Friday, August 3, the network announced on Monday. In addition, NBC has served 102.6 million video streams of the games to date, 147% more than the number of video streams served through the same time period during the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Some still contend that NBC has failed to engage a significant portion of the potential audience for the London games — namely, Internet users who don’t subscribe to a pay-television service, but for whom some notion of “social TV” is already a way of life. That argument doesn’t carry the day for Alan Wolk of KIT Digital, who offers sharp commentary at Digiday on why NBC has played ball with multichannel video programming distributors to bring live London streams to American TV viewers.

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