Have to say after years of NBC not airing Olympics events live to protect its primetime cover, it is amusing to hear how the storyline has changed for the network.
In a teleconference, NBC Sports chairman Mark Lazarus and research chief Alan Wurtzel basically said, “It’s not just about primetime, stupid.”
They told us to stop concentrating on just the primetime numbers, which actually have been solid. Lazarus even called it “an obsession” with media writers.
They said the bigger story is on the number of people consuming the Olympics live on various other platforms than good ol’ NBC.
“I know why we all focus on primetime, but to some extent that is a little bit of a legacy, because it doesn’t reflect the fact that it is not just primetime that is driving this Olympics being the most viewed Winter Olympics ever,” Wurtzel said.
Turns out letting people watch events live isn’t such a bad thing after all. Wurtzel noted there were 600,000 viewers for the video stream of Shawn White in the halfpipe Monday. NBCSN is doing huge numbers, as are NBC’s other platforms.
Lazarus: “NBCSN has also broken records both Saturday and Sunday and we continue to outpace what we did in London. We’ve put a strategy together of putting live figure skating there as well as many other live events, twelve hours of live content each day, that’s really paying off for us. The early weekday numbers have exceeded all of our numbers in London as well. So viewers are finding it and continue to come to NBCSN, which is continually becoming indispensable to the viewing audience. These Olympics further solidify that point, as we promised.
“We’ve done a lot of learning. We learned a lot in London where we aired certain events live that had previously been saved for primetime. We’ve applied that learning here. We’ll learn from these Olympics and we’ll continue to apply it to Rio and beyond as well.”
Wurtzel: “We love television but the future is not just about television. It’s about television complemented with all of the other platforms that we have. And when I say the audience responded, you know, how do we know that? Well for the past seven years, we produced something we call the TAMI, the total audience measurement index, and that reflects how people consume our content across the major platforms of TV, PC Internet, mobile and Tablets and VOD.
“So through Monday, February 10, the Sochi games have generated 160 million consumer media exposures. That’s 11% more than Vancouver on all of these platforms.”