Twelve years after the IOC began holding the Olympics every two years instead of every four, it’s legitimate to wonder whether America’s sports fans are experiencing Olympic fatigue. In the early days of the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, NBC’s ratings were down compared to prior years while some of the network’s competitors, pitting strong programming against the Olympics as never before, were drawing their largest audiences ever during an Olympic fortnight.
We think the reason for the ratings decline is less fatigue and more the fact that two trends we’ve seen at work over the last few years are continuing. One is that the audience for sports, which increasingly gets its news from the Internet and thus usually finds out who won which medal long before NBC’s broadcasts begin, may not be compelled to watch a competition whose outcome it already knows. Another might simply be that the Olympics, following the trend evident across much of the spectrum of sports broadcasting, are suffering from the ever-increasing fragmentation of the entertainment universe, with more and more channels offering more and more alternative programming.
There’s little that NBC can do to offset the fact that sports consumers have instantaneous information available to them. When the games are held outside of North America, time-zone differences are difficult to overcome.
On the latter point, though, NBC still has reason to smile. Nothing has yet come along that can hold sports consumers in thrall for two full weeks the way the Olympics do. That’s not to say that NBC, and the IOC, shouldn’t continue to try to shake things up a bit, as they have with the heavy focus on sports such as snowboarding that appeal to younger audiences.
It does mean, though, that at least for the foreseeable future, the games will continue to be a destination for sports fans. That’s good for NBC, good for the Olympics and ultimately good for the many millions of us who live and breathe sports.
