NBC expects 200M to watch Vancouver Olympics

With the Vancouver Olympics two weeks away, the pressure is on for broadcast partner NBC Universal, just coming off the embarrassment of their feuding late-night hosts and admissions that the company will lose money on the Games, which start Feb. 12.

“I’m very confident we’ll do well from a ratings standpoint,” NBC research guru Alan Wurtzel told reporters Thursday. He said he expects 200 million people to watch at least parts of the Vancouver Games over the 17-day telecast. That number would be fewer than the 215 million who tuned in for the Beijing Olympics, but more than the 184 million from the prior winter Olympics in Torino, Italy.

Mr. Wurtzel said “American Idol” and other popular TV shows may eat into Olympics viewership, but he said, “The Olympics is the ultimate reality show.”

Mr. Wurtzel, NBC Universal’s president of research, said measurements of consumers’ awareness of the Games and intent to view them are “huge,” but it might take another week or so for people to throw themselves fully into Olympic fever. “We’ve always found America has to get past the Super Bowl,” before they turn full attention to the Olympics, he said. (TV watchers: the Super Bowl is Feb. 7.)

In a wide-ranging discussion of NBC’s plans to track how people follow the Games on TV, online, on mobile devices and anywhere else (acronyms like TAMi and iMMi were tossed around liberally), Mr. Wurtzel outlined new research methods to better understand how much Olympics people catch online or on smartphones, and why: is it to re-watch their favorite snowboarder taking a nasty tumble, or is it to skip TV entirely?

Mr. Wurtzel said it was “absurd” to think online video viewing erodes TV viewing—practically an axiom among some TV-industry watchers, but an idea the TV companies dispute. “It used to be that media was a zero-sum game,” he said, but now people will watch Michael Phelps swimming on TV, and surf the Web at the same time to read up on his Subway sandwich sponsorship or watch his prior races. “It’s not that people will forsake one medium for another.”

“What I want us to be is the smartest media company on the planet,” Mr. Wurtzel said of all the research methods.

www.wsj.com