In rough Olympics, viewers perked up a bit in second week

NEW YORK >> In what was otherwise a rough two weeks in Tokyo for NBC, television viewers responded — at least slightly — to the U.S. Olympic team’s strong performance in the second half of the Games.

NBC’S prime-time broadcast viewership for the second week was down 46% compared to the Rio de Janeiro Olympics of 2016, the Nielsen company said. In the first week, NBC was down 52% compared to Rio.

Last Tuesday, the 14.3 million people who watched the Games on NBC was actually up from the 14 million that had watched a week earlier from Tokyo. Generally, viewership goes down in the second week of the Olympics as viewers begin to tire of the nightly competition.

NBC said the Tokyo games averaged 15.6 million in prime-time viewership when the main network, cable outlets and streaming are added in. That’s down 42% from the Olympics in Brazil.