Viewer excitement about the Olympics is translating into gold for NBC: The broadcaster now expects to break even on the London Games rather than take a loss.
“We are way ahead of where we thought we’d be,” NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke said Wednesday.
Covering the Olympics was more challenging for NBC this year because of the time difference with Europe. With London five hours ahead of New York, NBC isn’t able to show any events live in prime time. In Beijing four years ago, NBC was able to show morning events such as Michael Phelps’ gold-medal swims live during its evening broadcasts.
But instead of the expected 20 percent ratings plunge compared with Beijing, Burke said, NBC is seeing audiences up 9 percent so far, five days into the event.
“We think that is because of the way we promoted the Olympics during the hundred days leading up to the Olympics,” Burke said.
Tuesday’s Olympics telecast, featuring Phelps’ record-setting swim and the gold-medal performance of the U.S. women’s gymnastics team, had the highest rating of any night so far, according to Nielsen’s overnight measurement of the nation’s largest cities. A broader viewership estimate was expected later Wednesday.
Combined with higher production costs in London, NBC had expected at one point to take a $200 million loss for the games. NBC paid $1.2 billion for the rights to show the games on TV and online in the U.S.
Before the games opened, NBC said it sold more than $1 billion in ads, breaking the record of $850 million set during the Beijing Olympics in 2008. It got 10 percent more for every minute of prime-time advertising compared with Beijing. It also tripled its pre-sales of online ads to $60 million, as it’s streaming all events live for the first time.
The company’s bet that live streaming wouldn’t cut into prime-time television audiences appears to have paid off.
Better ratings could mean higher rates for ads sold at the last minute. Time Warner Inc., which owns TNT, TBS, CNN and other cable channels, said Wednesday that it has seen a slowdown in last-minute ad sales partly because advertisers are shifting money to the Olympics instead.
The bigger audience could also help NBC, which is fourth overall in U.S. ratings, promote new shows in its fall lineup and boost viewership of non-sports programs such as “Today” and “NBC Nightly News” during the Olympics.
The Olympics run through Aug. 12.
NBC is showing the Olympics on its main broadcast network, the Spanish-language Telemundo and the cable channels CNBC, MSNBC Bravo and NBC Sports Network. It also created specialty channels devoted to basketball and soccer and one for 3-D. The main network is broadcasting more than 270 hours of the Olympics, the most ever.
Burke indicated that he expected to break even from a cash perspective, meaning the cost of the broadcast rights and the production will be balanced by ad sales and other direct revenue. He made the comments on a conference call with Wall Street analysts to discuss the second-quarter earnings report of Comcast Corp., NBCUniversal’s parent company.
From a formal accounting perspective, the treatment of the Olympics is more complicated, as NBC made the deal with the International Olympic Committee before the Comcast bought the controlling stake in NBCUniversal early last year. Some of the loss was eliminated when Comcast absorbed NBCUniversal through what is known as purchase accounting.
Comcast Chief Financial Officer Michael Angelakis said on the call that the end result would be that the company will post a small gain from the event in the current quarter. That doesn’t mean the games will be profitable. Rather, it reverses the losses previously accounted for.
NBC lost money on the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, but previous games were profitable, if not wildly so. It has broadcast every Summer Olympics since 1988.
Last year, NBC outbid Fox and ESPN to gain the rights for four more Olympics, paying $4.38 billion through 2020.
Raoul Peck Resurrects A Once-Forgotten Anti-Apartheid Photographer In “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found”
When the photographer Ernest Cole died in 1990 at the age of 49 from pancreatic cancer at a Manhattan hospital, his death was little noted.
Cole, one of the most important chroniclers of apartheid-era South Africa, was by then mostly forgotten and penniless. Banned by his native country after the publication of his pioneering photography book "House of Bondage," Cole had emigrated in 1966 to the United States. But his life in exile gradually disintegrated into intermittent homelessness. A six-paragraph obituary in The New York Times ran alongside a list of death notices.
But Cole receives a vibrant and stirring resurrection in Raoul Peck's new film "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found," narrated in Cole's own words and voiced by LaKeith Stanfield. The film, which opens in theaters Friday, is laced throughout with Cole's photographs, many of them not before seen publicly.
As he did in his Oscar-nominated James Baldwin documentary "I Am Not Your Negro," the Haitian-born Peck shares screenwriting credit with his subject. "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" is drawn from Cole's own writings. In words and images, Peck brings the tragic story of Cole to vivid life, reopening the lens through which Cole so perceptively saw injustice and humanity.
"Film is a political tool for me," Peck said in a recent interview over lunch in Manhattan. "My job is to go to the widest audience possible and try to give them something to help them understand where they are, what they are doing, what role they are playing. It's about my fight today. I don't care about the past."
"Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" is a movie layered with meaning that goes beyond Cole's work. It asks questions not just about the societies Cole documented but of how he was treated as an artist,... Read More