These Olympic Games could be a real summer smash
Toolbox
By DIANE HOLLOWAY Austin American Statesman - Published: August 5, 2008
AUSTIN, Texas — The Beijing Summer Olympics — featuring impossible feats in sports popular with Americans — just might become the most-watched Olympics ever televised from a foreign country, a record previously held by the 2004 Athens Games.
Nobody expects the ratings of the Beijing Games to top past Olympics held on U.S. soil, but expectations are high. And NBC's ad revenue is already up $30 million over the Athens Games.
The opening ceremony, featuring fireworks and 15,000 performers, comes Friday, with sports events revving up Saturday and continuing for two weeks. The buzz over Beijing has become nearly deafening, and TV viewers are planning their lives accordingly.
NBC will have 3,600 hours of coverage spread out on its broadcast and cable networks and its Web site (nbcolympics.com ). The site, which was used as a companion to telecasts in Athens, has become a major player in Beijing, where 25 sports will be streamed live from 30 venues simultaneously.
With the economy in a slump and gas prices high, many people are sticking close to home, perhaps giving the Olympics extra appeal.
"Watching the Olympics is one of those highly desirable shared experiences at a time when the audience is getting more and more fragmented," said Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University's Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture. "The biggest enemy of past Summer Olympics has been people going on vacation, but with gas prices the way they are, fewer people are traveling."
And NBC, not surprisingly, is champing at the bit.
"America is really ready for this," said NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol via satellite from Beijing recently. "This is not exactly a joyful time in America right now. The audience suffers from paucity of scripted shows, but they're about to get some very real unscripted drama. The Olympics is the ultimate reality show."
Central Texas could produce an extra large audience thanks to excitement over 18 former or current Longhorns who are representing the United States. Cheering for our hometowners — medal seekers such as runners Sanya Richards and Leo Manzano, diver Laura Wilkinson and swimmer Ian Crocker — is likely to be loud and long.
"We're estimating our prime-time ratings could be 10 percent higher than the Athens Games in '04," said Eric Lassberg, general manager of KXAN, Austin's NBC affiliate. "We have so many athletes from Central Texas and the uniqueness of having the Games in a high-profile country like China play a part. And the long, hot days of summer here are a factor."
If KXAN gets a 10 percent boost from Beijing, the station could attract an average of nearly 160,000 households and more than 300,000 viewers in prime time - an audience on a par with Fox's top-rated "American Idol."
The Olympics traditionally draws even nonsports fans, and lots of American viewers may tune into the games because they're in China.
"For some people, China is a very intriguing, mysterious place," Thompson said. "And that's really being played up leading up to the games — not just because of the exotic beauty of the country but curiosity about how the people will behave. Will there be protests? It's an intriguing narrative."
None of the events from Athens was live, which means that Web browsers and news hounds knew the results before prime time. But sports purists will be pleased that more of the top sports will be seen live in prime time.
NBC negotiated early morning start times for swimming and gymnastics in Beijing so they would appear live in the evenings. With millions of Americans fixated on swimmer Michael Phelps' pursuit of record-breaking eight gold medals, live coverage is a big plus.
For the first time, NBC is telecasting all of its Olympics coverage in high-definition. Every camera will be HD, and every platform, from the network's cable channels (Telemundo, USA Network, CNBC, MSNBC and Oxygen) to its Web site, will display HD. A substantial portion of the Athens Games was telecast in HD, but fewer than 20 percent of viewers had HDTV sets. Today, more than 35 percent of TV owners have HDTVs, and that number climbs each month. In 2004, NBC used its cable siblings to showcase sports that are less popular in the U.S., but the total cable hours this time around have nearly doubled. Telemundo is expected to draw big crowds to its soccer coverage.
As of last week, NBC had sold more than 95 percent of its advertising space, at a rate of $750,000 per 30-second spot, and expected to rake in more than $1 billion in revenue. The total includes advertising on NBC, NBC's cable networks and online site, which more than offsets the $894 million that the network paid for the rights to the games. That's a profit of more than $100 million. The network paid $793 million for the Athens Games and earned a profit of about $70 million in ad revenue.
With so much competition now, Olympic ratings don't necessarily increase for each of the games, as they did back when the only options were the Big Three networks. For example, the audience dipped for the Sydney Games in 2000 compared with the last Olympics on foreign soil, in Barcelona in 1992 (the Summer Games were in Atlanta in 1996).
In any case, the 17-day marathon won't come close to the power of a Super Bowl, which in February popped advertisers for $3 million per 30-second spot and drew 97.5 million viewers for that one day. Over the two-week period, the Beijing Olympics are expected to attract a cumulative crowd of more than 200 million, but no one event will be Super Bowl-sized.
"Breaking records is hard to do in this day and age and in this environment," said Brad Adgate, research director for Horizon Media, a worldwide media buyer based in New York. "There are just too many more channels and too many opportunities for people's leisure time."
Syracuse's Thompson said he's not feeling enormous interest among his students in the Northeast, but he speculated that that could be "a graduate student thing."
Here in Central Texas, where Longhorns of all sports persuasions are beloved, the Olympics look like gold. And ad buyers nationwide agree.
"The Beijing Olympics do have the potential to be the most-watched because it's so widely available on so many formats," Adgate said. "We don't know exactly how to measure all of those platforms, but the lion's share of the audience will come to TV, and it will certainly be a very strong rating."
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