NBC's Thursday rating stalls for second night in a row
Thursday night marked the second night in a row that NBC's prime-time Beijing Games broadcast numbers fell below the numbers spun off by the comparable night of programming during the 2004 Athens Games.
The Thursday night broadcast, seen live in the East and on a three-hour delay in the West, generated a 17.9 rating, according to Nielsen Media Research data, down from 19.3 for the like night's Athens broadcast. The average television audience fell to 29.7 million from 31.7 million.
That broadcast from Athens, which included Carly Patterson becoming the first American since Mary Lou Retton in 1984 to win the all-around gold medal in women's gymnastics, finished as the highest-rated prime-time night for NBC during the entire Athens Games.
NBC's Thursday night broadcast from Beijing did feature Michael Phelps winning his sixth gold medal of the Beijing Games, as well as Nastia Liukin becoming the third U.S. woman to win the all-around individual gold in gymnastics -- behind Patterson and Retton.
Despite the double dip, NBC's Thursday ratings press release boasted that its seven-night average for prime-time broadcasts "beat the average combined totals of the other three networks by 171%: CBS (5.1 million), ABC (3.2 million) and Fox (3.0 million)."
-- Greg Johnson
Photo: Nastia Liukin during the women's gymnastics all-around final at Beijing's National Indoor Stadium on Thursday en route to the gold medal. Mandatory Credit: Mark J. Rebilas/US PRESSWIRE
Maybe they'd be having more success in the ratings if they'd made the logical decision to show things LIVE to the West Coast. I can understand showing things on a tape delay when the time zones are incompatible, but in this case they had the perfect opportunity to show some of the marquee events (swimming, gymnastics) in West Coast prime time. Instead we get several hours of boring beach volleyball and filler "human interest" stories at 8PM Pacific Time and have to stay up until 1:00 AM to see events that finished three hours earlier. We could've seen the women's all-around gymnastics final finish up around 10PM instead of 1:00 AM. (And tonight Bob Costas is saying that it ran "well past midnight ON THE EAST COAST. Does he not know that we got it well past midnight too?)
Posted by: J-Man | August 15, 2008 at 08:17 PM
Ditto on that. Gymnastics is one of the most watched Olympic sports, I think it is ridiculous to have it start at 11 PM. Thank goodness for TiVo.
Posted by: kb | August 16, 2008 at 08:05 AM