NBC’s Multiplatform Olympics Play Draws Millions

NBC’s strategy to stream live Olympics video online to pump up primetime numbers and boost fans’ round-the-clock interest in the Games appears to be paying off.

Through the first week of competition in Beijing, http://www.NBCOlympics.com set all-time usage records, drawing 25 million unique users to the Web site while serving up 22 million video streams as part of 456 million page views. Nearly 3 million visits to http://www.NBCOlympics.com and also were recorded through mobile and video-on-demand platforms.

Concurrently, NBC drew an average of 30.4 million viewers through the first four nights of its primetime coverage of the games, representing a 16% increase over viewership for the 2004 Athens summer games. NBC said it captured 157 million total viewers for the first several nights, which included coverage of popular swimming and gymnastics competition, for a total gain of 15 million viewers for the Athens games over the same span.

“The numbers are awesome,” Gary Arlen, a media analyst, said. “No matter how you analyze this, it’s a huge success for supporting a sports event.”

Arlen noted that it remained to be seen whether online viewers were gravitating to non-mainstream sports that NBC was streaming to appeal to niche audiences. He also said there could still be some ratings erosion for small-market NBC affiliates because of the abundance of online video.

NBCOlympics.com on MSN drew 6 million users daily and generated 3.5 million hours of video content. NBC reported users were spending nearly 15 minutes on the site per visit, and 20 minutes per visit when they accessed video content.

The NBC mobile site generated 9.5 million page views with users spending six minutes online per visit.

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