Denver earns silver for viewership
Denver viewers watched the Rio Olympics in prime time in greater numbers than in any other U.S. market except Salt Lake City, according to an NBC ratings report released Tuesday.
Sports-loving TV watchers in Denver gave NBC’s 2016 Summer Olympics coverage a 19.1 share, compared with Salt Lake City’s 20.4 share, for the 14 days of coverage in prime time. Share describes the percentage of viewers in the market who are watching a given television station or program.
The other top 10 markets were Indianapolis (third), Austin, Texas (fourth), Columbus, Ohio (fifth), West Palm Beach, Fla. (sixth), San Diego and Richmond, Va. (tied for seventh), and Minneapolis, St. Louis, Fort Myers, Fla., and Norfolk, Va. (tied for ninth). Descriptive Video Works employees narrate, from NBC studios in Stamford, Conn., a volleyball match from the Rio Olympics on Aug. 10. Joe Frederick, The Associated Press
Despite being mid-sized, “non-major markets,” the No. 1 and 2 ratings cities both contain large numbers of active, outdoorsy viewers, said Darrin DuberSmith, marketing professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver.
“There’s a pent-up demand for spectator sports that people actually participate in, like swimming and running,” said DuberSmith, who pointed to recent news of a 24/7 Rio Olympics channel as evidence. “The primary consumers of individual sports are the people who play or used to play a sport, and the Olympics are not your average spectator sports. They’re participation sports.”
Broadly, television viewership has declined as more people cut cable subscriptions and move to on-demand programming available through Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu.
Still, NBC boasted some impressive numbers:
• NBC Olympics’ digital coverage included 3.3 billion total streaming minutes, 2.71 billion live streaming minutes and 100 million unique users.
• 78 percent of U.S. TV homes tuned into NBC’s Rio games coverage, which had a TV-only audience of 198 million viewers, according to national data provided by The Nielsen Company.