Olympics Ratings Remain Low On Night Of Nathan Chen’s Historic Quad Display
February 17, 2018
Olympics Ratings Remain Low On Night Of Nathan Chen’s Historic Quad Display
A week into the PyeongChang Olympics and Team USA currently has nine medals and for a moment it looked like Nathan Chen was poised to add to that roster last night in men’s figure skating.
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Winter Olympics: Nathan Chen Executes Six Quadruple Jumps, Rockets Back Into Medal Contention
Coming off an initially weaker than expected performance, the Salt Lake City native put some history on the ice at the XXIII Winter Games in NBC’s primetime as he pulled off a record shatter five clean quadruple jumps and one more with a touch. In the end though, like the efforts of Lindsey Vonn in the women’s super-G ski event, it just weren’t enough to make it the podium.
In an Olympics that is down almost 8% overall from the XXII Winter Games of 2014 and looking to be heading towards an overall low despite its multi-platform efforts, NBC may be feeling a bit like that coming off the first Friday of official competition of the 2018 Games.
With a 13.0/23 in metered market results for NBC and NBC Sports Network’s primetime coverage, the net matched its low for the PyeongChang games. The combo of the Comcast-owned outlets slipped to the same rating in early numbers on February 15.
One sliver of silver is that the NBC/NBCSN metered market meld did top the comparable night results of the Sochi games from 2014 by 11% but was still behind Vancouver 2010.
It should be noted that the Meredith Vieira hosted Valentine’s Day 2014 primetime coverage of the competition out of Russia was only shown on NBC itself. However, if you go NBC’ 18 to NBC’14, last night’s Mike Tirico fronted coverage took a small stumble of 4% from that Friday of just over four years ago when a number of potential viewers were clearly out for a romantic or hopefully romantic dinner.
Compared to the NBC-only primetime broadcast of the first Friday of official competition of the 2010 Winter Olympics out of Vancouver, last night’s NBC and NBCSN combined coverage dipped 3%. In a focus very telling of the changing media landscapes, a look at just NBC ’18 to NBC’ 10 reveals a drop of 16%
It’s not really competitive apples to apples, but Hell, if we are talking stats, last night’s primetime Olympics show on the two NBCUniversal outlets unsurprisingly fell 23% from the Katie Couric co-hosted Opening Ceremony of February 9.
Hitting a low in official competition at that point, the first Friday of the Sochi 2014 games went on to score 19.2 million viewers for its NBC-only broadcast – which was basically what the February 14 and February 15 nights of the 2018 Games have achieved on NBC and NBCSN put together.
As we say every day, we’ll update with more Olympics rating and the rest of what was on last night later on when those numbers come in. In the meantime, here is a stat for you: last night’s primetime coverage hit a high of 14.8/25 during the women’s skiing on NBC proper and the men’s free skate figure skating on NBCSN in the 10 – 10:15 PM ET slot.
Have a good long weekend America.