How Many People Are Watching the Olympics? NBC Attempts a Tricky Head Count

NBC's coverage of the Olympics has been horrid. The announcer's are horrid.

The amount of commercial breaks kills it for me

American coverage of the olympics is always terrible. You would never know there were any other countries competing.

Luckily, here in Seattle we get a Canadian TV station on cable. It's coverage of the Olympics is far superior to that of NBC.

I agree that the Olympic viewing experience has gone downhill: too many talking heads chit-chatting in studio sets, athletes crying in anguish or joy, teasers, and whatnot. Let the games begin (and please televise them). Please worry less about counting viewers and invest more in attracting them.

If you get the chance, watch the Olympics on ANY other nation's broadcasts, that way you get to see all the sports. NBC just show Team USA and fill the rest of their air time with puff pieces. I am as patriotic as the next guy, but come on - it's the Olympics. There is a whole World of Sport out there.

Tried to watch. Too painful.

I don't understand why NBC doesn't stream the Olympics and their programming in general over the internet. I'll watch commercials. I don't have useable TV reception where I live and don't have cable. Any thoughts out there?

NBC is once again doing their best to make the Olympics unwatchable. In a nod to the NFL split screen = fewer commercials baloney they're doing that as if watching figure skating with a Ram Truck ad running loudly next to it is WAY BETTER. Also nonstop coverage of Shawn White qualifying was so mind numbingly boring I had to change the channel. You'd think there was only one sport. It is the same stuff they're shoveling during summer olympics with nonstop coverage of beach volleyball. When they're only trying to appeal to 12 year old boys it's not very fun for the rest of us.

Setting up NBC's live-stream, which is the Olympic Broadcast Services world feed, alongside NBC's prime-time coverage is highly informative. For instance, last night was men's halfpipe. When NBC went to commercial, the OBS stream typically showed two or three competitors who typically went totally unmentioned by NBC. We saw Yuto Totsuka's horrifying crash live on the OBS stream; NBC was in a commercial break. When NBC came back, they showed a brief establishing shot of the venue in which you could see paramedics attending Totsuka in the distant pipe... and then cut to a minute or so of Shaun White chatting with his posse backstage at the top of the pipe. THEN they allowed as how there had been a bad accident, and showed Totsuka's run on delay. Meanwhile, OBS is showing the rescue effort and the stunned reaction of the Japanese coaches and the audience. It seemed to me like NBC felt inconvenienced that Totsuka was injured, requiring them to admit he even existed. Later, as the venue podiums got underway, you could hear the venue announcer calling Shaun White's name and the crowd reacting in the background as NBC's announcers blathered on-camera about how great this was, and how soon they'd have Shaun at the podium… then the podiums on tape-delay, with a LIVE label in the corner. (NBC is consistently sloppy about that LIVE label!) NBC can't understand that the Olympics are about the competition, not about one or two marketable athletes.

Seeing as I've been able to keep my attention focused for longer than a hummingbird's wing beat, I'll also mention this is disturbing precedent. As you might already know, Comcast and NBC Universal are effectively one entity. They merged back around 2011. TAD is a tacit admission NBC was price favoring ad space for television content over other media sources. TV ad space costs more because TV viewers are worth more than digital viewers. That's how the argument goes anyway. You can guess Comcast's subscription based TV model appreciated this favored position. By introducing TAD, Comcast/NBC are agreeing to re-weight the metrics to allow more preference for digital ad space. However, and this is a big exception, they've effectively in-housed the ad pricing mechanism in the same process. Nielsen is cut out of the loop. They can't even pretend to be a third-party verification anymore. Ad-buyers just got black-boxed out of a major network and distribution channel. Comcast and NBC will tell you how much their ad space is worth now. This is what happens when you allow product and utility providers to consolidate. The gas company is suddenly telling you the efficiency rating on your furnace.

NBC's strength lies not in its Olympic coverage, but in its coverup of Matt Lauer and all scandals in the morning newsrooms. I wish ABC would take over again. I've been glued -- and fast forwarding because I can't tolerate the constant commercials. It's commercials occasionally interrupted by sports. They've managed to destroy the figure skating competition by only showing the last groups in competition and giving us barely an amuse bouche on the athletes. The opening ceremony? An abomination in coverage. I expect more from NBC -- but they're not delivering. At.all. On The Today Show today -- all hosts are at the games -- and the producers decided it would be ok for all of us, the viewers, desperate for NEWS coverage and sports results, to watch a "valentine" of all the infant offspring and significant others. Really? COME ON nbc. You can and should do better.

I haven't seen any of the Olympics this year. I last watched several seasons ago. It seemed like endless commercials and fluff pieces. If you want to watch sports, this isn't the place to be.

The television executives attempting to divine what those numbers mean seem to rely upon divine hope. I suspect they make up a number, and then try to find a rational for it, that the advertisers will believe.

Some of the worst Olympic coverage ever. 3 minutes of sports, 3 minutes of ads. Sappy "profiles" of the athletes. Half an hour of men's biathlon while snowboarding is underway. Who makes these decisions?

NBC totally botched a very important component of media viewership this Olympics. They took their on-demand services in house and promoted live over replay. I imagine this ties into service charges for digital recording boxes. A service that effectively amounts to an over priced hard drive with a lousy user interface. Either way though, I can guarantee NBC lost viewers because they fortressed the content with an obnoxiously high pay wall for what should be broadcast content. If connecting ad buyers to consumers is your revenue stream, NBC failed miserably. I don't care what TAD or any other metric says. NBC got the strategy wrong. You can stream broadcast television from any computer, including cell phones, for the price of about a $15 piece of hardware. Hook this device up to a hard drive and the entire Olympics is free to watch whenever. No more waiting through hours of tedious events you don't care about only to miss your favorite athletes because you had to work at the particular moment NBC happened to cover your sport. However, you need a massive amount of storage to record live-stream television. This is the catch that drives people towards subscription services. The method is intentional. However, as noted before, no one who has already disdained the traditional cable model is going to revert for a single sporting event. Personally, I've watched anywhere from 10-50 percent less Olympics than I would have if my consumption preferences were met. Like I said: Botched

I have loved and hated NBC's Olympic coverage for years, in equal measure. I love the superb camera and production work and their ability to bring these sports and athletes into our homes. Slo-mo's, incredible camera angles, clips of previous performances, side-by-side comparisons, etc. Simply top-notch work, guys. On the other hand, I have loathed the jingoism, the mawkish personal interest stories and the sheer number of them at the expense of interesting coverage, the (mostly) witless talking heads, and the unending commercial interruptions. I understand that the network paid a ridiculous amount of money for the broadcast rights and need to cover costs and generate some profit but these interruptions ruin continuity and make this programing very difficult to watch. Roone Arledge, Jim McKay et al, where are you when we need you the most? I think wistfully about ABC's Olympic coverage every couple of years.....

What about the viewers who get started but then stop watching because of boring presentations, too American, one day old, too much and conflicting advertising. Is that a statistical negative or a "0.5" multiplier. Whatever, just count me in as a "0.25" watcher then dropping down to "0.0" in 3 days..

In our house, the family watches some live and some DVD'd versions of Olympic events shown on NBC and the Olympics Channel – all on the big screen. We may fast forward through ads on one watching but sit through them when someone else in the family is in charge of the remote or when we're watching live. We tend to rewatch the ice dancing two or three times. We always fast forward through curling, moguls, speed skating, biathlon and most Nordic skiing. Solve for x: Take a family of four, toss out one who doesn't care about the Olympics, add the boyfriend who does (sometimes) and subtract one-half for the adult daughter with no television set who watches the recordings when she visits from out of town weeks later. How many "viewers" do you get? Dependent or independent variable? If we've seen a commercial twice in its entirety, whenever possible we fast forward through it on all subsequent showings.

I'm not watching. Too heavily advertised in the time leading up to the Olympics. I can get the news post facto. I'm an Ann Curry fan.

NBC finally realized, after 30 years, that having the entire country viewing coverage, simultaneously, is at least a start. Unfortunately, they have never matched the level when ABC covered the Olympics. There are just too many commercials to make it enjoyable. For example, watching Curling, they end up showing half and end, because they break for two to three minutes between ends. For those who understand curling, they know what I mean. The Opening Ceremony was chopped to pieces, as always. And, as reported by news outlets, NBC should at least hire analysts who are familiar with China, Korea and Japan; their distinct cultures, and the role Japan played in the area for much of the history of the area. NBC should so, what they do with like soccer, run continued coverage, and use banners for ads. Coverage e from KBS (South Korea(, CBC (Canada) BBC (UK), manage very well by limiting ads. They also have better commentators. Having Americans commentate on Curling is very painful, almost as bad as Soccer. While, yes I can watch the streams, but why have an app when you have OTA, and digital subchannel capability to air the streams. Maybe, when atc 3.0 goes live, this may become a viable option.

NBC's coverage of the Olympics is insipid. Coverage of non-US athletes is very abbreviated and often interrupted, the coverage of US athletes continues to be characterized by flag-waving and the necessary dramatic, heartstring-tugging back stories of the challenges each has faced. Do I really want to see a ten minute feature about an skater with belly pain that culminates with a view of her surgical scars? I'd rather spend the 10 minutes watching a non-American athlete displaying her or his skills in a competition. And, those commercials...even more insipid. I've been watching coverage on the BBC feed and am seeking other sources of unbiased, intelligent coverage from elsewhere in the world.

NBC's using the same software to estimate viewers that they used to predict that Hillary was going to be president.

So do they count the 1/2 hour Nightly News viewers? Why not it's just a one long commercial for the Olympics.

I vividly recall being "glued" to the TV watching the "live" feed of the US-USSR semifinal hockey game during the 1980 Winter Olympics. The date was Feb. 22 and the network was ABC. But then again, in that pre- ESPN era (it was a few months before ESPN began) ABC deemed perhaps the most anticipated hockey game in US sports history to be not worthy of a live airing and instead showed it on tape delay in primetime after the game had ended. Perhaps ABC didn't have the power to sway the IOC to switch the game to primetime (of course, Lake Placid is on EST), but to not show it live was blasphemy. But in those pre-Internet days, it was somewhat easier to avoid learning of the result. And now we have NBC with its interminable ads and using its "sway" to get figure skaters on the ice in the morning for their US viewing audience. Times have changed, though the plethora of ads haven't.

I watched the Olympics....but it wasn't on nbc! Thank God I live near Canada. Excelent coverage and no pandering to NK.

While I for one have been watching these Olympics across the NBC stream, I’m sure I’m not the only one who is fed up with all the pharmaceutical ads! And isn’t it ironic, to see world class athletes in their sports, against a backdrop of cancer, diabetes, and heart medicines?!