2008 Summer Olympics TV Ratings Update:

The Summer Olympics continue to be a big TV audience draw on both sides of the border.

USA

NBC is reporting that, based on the first 10-days of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games telecasts from Beijing, in excess of 196 million viewers have watched some portion of the games. Comparably, this would rank this Olympiad as the fourth most-watched event in U.S. TV history behind the 1996 Games in Atlanta (209 million), the 1994 Lillehammer Games (204 million) and 2004 Athens Games (203 million). Viewership in prime time (8 PM to 11 PM) over the 10-day period has averaged 29.8 million. That ranks the Beijing Games 14 percent ahead of Athens in 2004 (which attracted 26.2 million average viewers). Finally, the 17.2 rating/30 share in households is the best pace through to the second Sunday for a Summer Olympics staged outside of the USA since Barcelona in 1992 (which posted a 18.6/35 score in that measure)

Courtesy of its Olympics coverage, NBC attracted 28,681,000 average viewers last week in week 47 (08/11 through 08/17) of the TV season (which began back in September 2007). Comparably, CBS the #2 ranked network only averaged 5,061,000 average viewers.

The individual nightly telecasts ranked (according to Nielson Media Research) as follows
(in 000s):

1 SUM OLYM TUE 34010 11.9
2 SUM OLYM SAT 31590 11.0
3 SUM OLYM MON 30170 10.5
4 SUM OLYM THU 29710 10.4
5 SUM OLYM WED 27660 9.7
6 SUM OLYM SUN 27180 9.5
7 SUM OLYM FRI 26070 9.1


Canada

Based on the most currently available Canadian ratings (which tend to lag release of the US ratings), for the week of August 4 to August 10, Olympics coverage also got off to decent start on CBC, attracting an average of 1.2 million viewers in prime time for the three day period from Friday August 8 (featuring a rebroadcast of the opening ceremonies) thru Sunday August 10. This average still trailed the totals CTV posted for reality competition shows like “So You Think You Can Dance”, “Canadian Idol” and its original Summer crime-drama “Flashpoint”. Applying the usual 10:1 (Canada:US) market-size rule, it would appear that the Olympics are considerably more popular south of the border than in Canada.

Details here: