The only thing I'm sicker of than the Olympics

So on my arrival back into town from the long weekend, I get this:

My name is Nick Bromberg, and I am a journalism student at MU. I am writing a story for class about the Olympic ratings and was wondering if I could ask you a couple of things.

• Have the Olympics lost their relevance? Or with the arrival of the glut of information on the internet, are people less interested to tune in when they know the results?
• Does NBC need to do things differently in order to increase the ratings? Perhaps live coverage on a cable network of the important events, and then a replay on the network at night?
• Do you foresee giant ratings for the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, which will be mostly live? Or are the Turin games a sign of things to come?

To which I replied:

Hi Nick.  I think ratings stories about the coverage of the Olympics have soared in "relevance" -- and god only knows why.  NBC is a fourth-rated network and if it weren't for Turin they wouldn't be winning ANY time periods EVER.

The need to comment on the Winter Games has been the driver behind some remarkably insipid commentary, even from unlikely quarters. Everybody is cooking up cockamamie theories for why the Olympics ratings were so "low."  Meanwhile, my newspaper, and every newspaper I saw during the past two weeks, invariably featured Olympics coverage on the covers.  It was all anyone on ESPN could talk about -- and half those guys hate the Winter Games.  Seems the Olympics are relevant to a lot of folk.

Ironically, it's the expansion of media that has fueled the talk of the Olympics being irrelevant -- because all these gasbags with talk shows and blogs need something to talk about, and this is the topic du jour. Never mind that's it's b.s.  NBC spent probably $5 million an hour for its primetime coverage and improved its ratings in nearly every time period, where it would've been spending $2-$3 million an hour anyway. Plus it generated a blizzard of off-network revenue that will allow it to make almost as much money off the Olympics as it does "The Tonight Show."  Any network would take that.

Comments

[Ryan]

Yeah, I guess there have been a lot of "the Olympics sky is falling" stories in the past few weeks.

Just to refute one part of Nick's questions. The key events of the Vancouver Games will likely be tape-delayed on the West Coast, just like the Salt Lake City Games in 2002.

NBC will likely defend this decision pointing to the fact that the West Coast had higher ratings with tape-delay compared to the East Coast and its live coverage. It's the same argument they used in this year's media kit.

As long as NBC is making money and meeting its advertisers' goals (which they apparently have been), the network will have little desire to change things up.

That said, I imagine the Vancouver Games ratings will be closer to SLC's than Turin's because they will be held in North America.

- Ryan

[Jason]

I don't get all the hand-wringing either. In Minneapolis, where I live, the Olympics consistently got about an 18 rating. I'd take those "bad" numbers anytime.

NBC got crap when they aired those overdramatic, syrupy features. This year they basically covered the events, sans feature stories. And now people are asking what NBC needs to do to fix their ratings. Crazy.

I do imagine the NBC demos will be off a bit, as Idol and Grey's Anatomy probably siphoned off some of the young people. Will CBS air new CSIs against the Vancouver Olympics? That's the interesting question to me.

[Marshall Letcher]

The 2010 Olympics in Vancouver will be "awesome."

We Canadians have the option of watching Olympic coverage on local Canadian channels, and, via cable, on nearby NBC affiliates and other NBC stations in other time zones. So, we enjoy ample converage of the Olympic games.

ML