Final numbers:
Vancouver ranks No. 2
NBC's Olympics draw 190 million total viewers
By Louisa Ada Seltzer
Mar 2, 2010
In the end, the Vancouver Olympics will go down as the second-most-watched Winter Games ever, dominating the bulk of the competition, though still getting walloped by "American Idol" a couple of times.
NBC Universal's Vancouver coverage drew 190 million viewers over 17 days, meaning more than half of Americans tuned in to some portion of the Games on five broadcast and cable networks.
That's 14 million fewer than the all-time best Winter Games, in Lillehammer in 1994, but 3 million more than Salt Lake City in 2002, which boasted a considerably higher average viewership per night.
Vancouver managed 24.4 million total viewers per night, up 21 percent from the 20.2 million averaged by Turin. That's a big accomplishment in an era of falling ratings, about equal to the 1998 Nagano Games and down from Lillehammer and Salt Lake City.
NBC's Games drew more total viewers than the other Big Four networks combined during the 17 days of Olympics coverage, and only one show, Fox's nearly unstoppable "Idol," managed to top the Games head to head. During the last Olympics, five shows managed that feat.
Fox merrily points out that, head to head, "Idol" outdrew the Olympics by 6 percent in total viewers and 55 percent among adults 18-49 during their eight hours of head-to-head competition.
Still, the real story of the Games may be how different coverage of the Olympics will be going forward.
This year's Games were nearly unavoidable, with more than 800 hours of coverage across NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, USA and Universal HD, and thus it's not surprising that they'd become the second-most-watched Games. Sixteen years ago at Lillehammer, the Olympics were a single-network venture.
But taking nothing away from NBC's numbers, the Olympics also air against a heck of a lot more competition, with hundreds of channels and the internet there to steal viewers' attention.
There was a lot of criticism lobbed at NBC for the way in which it covered the Games, limiting live coverage mainly to the East Coast, showing many events on tape delay, and refusing to air live internet feeds so as to force people to watch that night's taped events.
Those who wanted to remain "unspoiled" before watching Bode Miller ski found it nearly impossible. Anywhere you looked online or on television was already spouting off the results, leading to speculation that there will be changes for the 2014 coverage of Russia's Olympics.
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