Women’s events ruled ’18 Olympic TV coverage
The Winter Olympics were the Women Olympics on NBC. For the first time in Winter Games history, NBC televised more minutes of women’s competition than men’s.
“You just want the best stories,” Jim Bell, NBC’s president of production and programming, said from Pyeongchang, South Korea in a phone conversation just prior to the final weekend’s broadcasts. “We at NBC, we just want to tell the best stories.”
With the United States’ overall medal count a disappointment, NBC was not dealt a perfect hand at these Games, as many of the pre-Olympic storylines did not pan out. While the overall ratings were down in prime time around 8 percent, following the overall trend in live sports, Bell said NBC routinely doubled the other broadcast networks “combined.”
Meanwhile, NBCSN dominated cable and digital streaming, reaching 2 billion minutes streamed, which provides an outlet for monetization to help offset the nearly $1 billion NBC paid for these Games.
In these Olympics, nearly 52 percent of the coverage came from women’s events, according to a study by the University of Alabama’s communications school. It was largely because of women such as Mikaela Shiffrin, who won an early gold in the giant slalom and became an attraction throughout the Games. Lindsey Vonn, in likely her last Olympics, only won one bronze, but she was a compelling watch because of her many injuries and comebacks to go along with her honoring her late grandfather, who served in the Korean War. Plus, the United States’ women’s hockey team broke through to win gold.
In the Winter Games, there is usually a huge gap in favor of men’s coverage over women’s — 20 percent or more, according to Andrew Billings, the University of Alabama’s chair of its broadcast journalism and creative media department. In Sochi, four years ago, the gap closed to less than 6 percent, Billings said.
By contrast, the Summer Olympics in London in 2012 and the 2016 Rio Olympics featured slightly more women’s coverage than men’s.
More women watched the Olympics than men. About 55 percent of the audience was female, according to NBC. The U.S. won 23 medals overall, which was fourth best.
“People don’t tune in to see how the men do or the women do,” Billings said. “They tune it to see how the United States does.”
“One of the great things about the Olympics is you come in with a certain level of expectations about who the stars are going to be and who is going to be standing on the podium,” Bell said.
In the end, on TV, it was the women who ruled.