NBC Universal said the first two days of the Beijing Olympics drew an average audience of 29.1 million, making it the most highly rated broadcast of the Summer Games held outside the United States since 1976.
In total, 114 million televison viewers tuned in for at least part of its broadcast during the first two days, about 20 million more than the 2004 games in Athens, NBC said, citing figures from Nielsen Media Research.
The Internet did not break or melt carrying The Olympics in the first weekend, reports Tom Steinert-Threlkeld on ZDNet. Here are the first three days totals:
Only about 2% of NBC’s Olympics audience watched online streams exclusively. On average, about 1.5 people are huddled around each computer screen, when a stream is being played. Most viewers are not watching complete soccer games or other events. Average time spent on the site is just starting to reach 15 minutes.
To put 3.1 million streams in one day in perspective, ZDNet says Google’s video sites typically deliver more than 4 billion views, in a month. YouTube accounts for 98% of that, according to comScore. Which means in the latest figures released, that YouTube delivered 4.1 billion views in one month.
That translates to roughly 132 million videos viewed off YouTube’s servers, every day in May. So, Saturday’s NBC Olympics streaming total was about 2% of that.
Nielsen Online, a service of The Nielsen Company, today released U.S. Internet audience figures for the top 10 most visited Olympics-related content Web sites and traffic to NBC’s online video content. Nielsen says the top ten 2008 Olympic web sites are:
- NBC Olympics
- Yahoo Olympics
- AOL Olympics
- Beijing 2008.cn
- NY Times Olympics
- ESPN Olympics
- USA Today Olympics
- Olympics.org
- BBC Olympics
- Sports Illustrated Olympics
With momentum building prior to the opening ceremonies, fans are now finding results, news and video online.
Related Olympics coverage on Dailywireless includes The 2008 Olympics: On Demand.
