Speaker 1: This is taking stock with Kathleen Hayes and Pim Fox
Speaker 1: on Bloomberg Radio the Rio Olympics gold medals and swimmers
Speaker 1: telling stories. But let's not forget us gymnasts as well
Speaker 1: as the other athletes who managed to pull off great
Speaker 1: feats of sporting expertise. Is that what NBC has been
Speaker 1: able to do. Here to tell us more, Jerry Smith,
Speaker 1: media reporter, Bloomberg News. He can be followed on Twitter
Speaker 1: at Jerry F. Smith. Great to have you with us, Jerry,
Speaker 1: thanks for being here, Thanks for having me. So do
Speaker 1: you think that the our ratings, Now, I was gonna
Speaker 1: say our ratings like NBC's tell us about the ratings
Speaker 1: that NBC has been able to generate with their coverage
Speaker 1: of the Olympics and the business of advertising, how that
Speaker 1: all works together. Sure. So the ratings NBC's Olympics ratings
Speaker 1: on the brad on its broadcast channel are down about
Speaker 1: seventeen invent so far this year compared to four years ago,
Speaker 1: and they're down even more about among eighteen to forty
Speaker 1: nine year olds, which is that demographic that advertisers really
Speaker 1: want to reach. So, you know, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: different theories for why that is. I mean, you could
Speaker 1: argue that Netflix, for example, four years ago, had half
Speaker 1: as many subscribers as it does today, so it's a
Speaker 1: much more popular. Uh. Snapchat was still in its infancy
Speaker 1: back in two twelve. There's just a lot more entertainment
Speaker 1: options for people than there was four years ago. And
Speaker 1: another theory is that NBC for the first time put
Speaker 1: all of the Olympics online more than six thousand hours,
Speaker 1: and what that might have done is actually deluded the
Speaker 1: ratings on the traditional television broadcast, which is where most
Speaker 1: of their advertising revenue still comes from. All right, well,
Speaker 1: if that we if that's the case, uh, would NBC
Speaker 1: have to make good for the Uh, I don't know
Speaker 1: what you would call it the guarantee east of ratings
Speaker 1: that advertisers thought they were buying. Yes, yeah, NBC says
Speaker 1: that they actually set aside enough extra advertising during the
Speaker 1: Olympics to make the advertisers whole, because they guaranteed the
Speaker 1: advertisers they would reach a certain number of viewers. And UH,
Speaker 1: during the first week at least, they were falling short
Speaker 1: of those guarantees. But looking forward, you know, the ratings
Speaker 1: being down does raise a question about whether NBC can
Speaker 1: continue to make the same sort of advertising revenue and
Speaker 1: profits that it did this year and that it has
Speaker 1: in the past. With the ratings being down this year,
Speaker 1: and if you're looking at those, Olympics are going to
Speaker 1: be in the Asian time zone, which is uh not
Speaker 1: as advantageous as this year in Rio, which was only
Speaker 1: a one hour time difference from New York. So there
Speaker 1: was the ability to show more of the events live
Speaker 1: this year, and this has added importance because of the
Speaker 1: price that NBC's parent company, Cast paid for the exclusive
Speaker 1: US broadcast rights to the Olympics all the way through
Speaker 1: twenty thirty two. They paid twelve billion dollars. That's a
Speaker 1: lot of money. It is a lot of money and Comcast,
Speaker 1: which owens NBC is making a really big bet on
Speaker 1: the Olympics, and a lot of other media companies have
Speaker 1: made similar bets about the value of live sports because
Speaker 1: right now audiences are becoming more and more fragmented, and
Speaker 1: the thinking has been the one sure thing that's still
Speaker 1: going to get large numbers of of live viewers is
Speaker 1: live sports. And NBC did still dominate the television landscape
Speaker 1: for the past two weeks with their Olympics coverage, but
Speaker 1: it is the ratings are down from four years ago,
Speaker 1: and it does raise the question of what what's going
Speaker 1: to happen in future Olympics. What do we know about
Speaker 1: the viewership of NFL, you know, uh, National Football League
Speaker 1: as well as Major League Baseball would have been the
Speaker 1: trends there tell us about some of the demographics that
Speaker 1: these the broadcasters are facing. Yeah, what's really interesting is
Speaker 1: that in some sports the fans are actually getting older. Um.
Speaker 1: Major League Baseball and the NFL have both seen the
Speaker 1: average age um increase about four to seven years, so
Speaker 1: their audience is actually getting older. And what happened with
Speaker 1: the Olympics is the ratings for that younger demographic, the
Speaker 1: eighteen to forty nine year olds, actually they watched less
Speaker 1: of the Olympics than the overall population. So, you know,
Speaker 1: it does raise the question of there's just more entertainment
Speaker 1: options for those younger audiences. NBC did something really interesting
Speaker 1: this year where they had a Snapchat channel and they
Speaker 1: asked BuzzFeed to run their Snapchat channel, and the thinking
Speaker 1: is that they could entice more young viewers who are
Speaker 1: on Snapchat to you know, check out the Olympics. On television,
Speaker 1: and that's really I think going to be a bigger,
Speaker 1: a bigger part of their strategy going forward, where a
Speaker 1: lot of that that next generation of television viewers doesn't
Speaker 1: immediately go on television to to watch the Olympics. Is
Speaker 1: there some is there some way to kind of judge
Speaker 1: which events did really well on the during the Olympics,
Speaker 1: like the US gymnastics. Yeah, I think the big events
Speaker 1: where generally the events that have the big American stars
Speaker 1: like Simone Biles for example. Right, the gymnastics did did well. Uh,
Speaker 1: the swimming did well, but it didn't overall, the Olympics
Speaker 1: were down this year and we will have to see
Speaker 1: how NBC approaches that going forward for future Olympics. I
Speaker 1: want to thank you very much for spending time with me.
Speaker 1: Jerry Smith is our media reporter for Bloomberg News. You
Speaker 1: can follow him on Twitter at Jerry F. Smith. Talking
Speaker 1: about Comcast and NBC shares a Comcast down a little
Speaker 1: bit more than a dollar share right now. This is
Speaker 1: Bloomberg