Jury out on NBC’s €10bn long-term Olympics bet

In June, Steve Burke described what he called his Olympics “nightmare.”

“We wake up someday and the ratings are down 20%,” the chief executive of NBC Universal said.

“If that happens, my prediction would be that millennials had been in a Facebook bubble or a Snapchat bubble and the Olympics have come, and they didn’t know it.”

He has escaped that with the Rio games this year but not by much. US prime-time broadcast viewership has been down about 17% compared to the London games four years ago.

And in the 18-to-49-year-old age group coveted by advertisers, it’s been even worse. That audience has been 25% smaller.

The Summer Olympics ratings slip, the first since 2000, raises fresh doubts about what used to be a sure thing: Live sports would be a huge and growing draw no matter what.

That’s why NBC parent Comcast paid $12bn (€10.6bn) for exclusive US broadcast rights to the Olympics through 2032.

Others, including Walt Disney’s ESPN, 21st Century Fox, Time Warner and CBS have made long-term bets on US football, baseball and basketball.

To be sure, many US sporting events are as big as ever.

The Super Bowl in February pulled in 112 million viewers, making it the third most-watched event in TV history.

However, one issue is that many fans are getting older.

The average age over the past decade of National Football League and Major League Baseball viewers has increased by four and seven years, to 47 and 53, according to Ben Thompson, founder of the blog Stratechery.

“Sports is less ingrained in the younger demographic,” said Brandon Ross, an analyst at BTIG Research.

“It has been replaced by other things like video games and e-sports and Snapchat feeds,” Mr Ross said.

And Americans have more entertainment choices. During the 2012 Olympics, Snapchat was in its infancy and Netflix had about half as many US subscribers.

NBC Sports chairman Mark Lazarus said the network has a plan to profit from its Olympics investment, by giving people more options.

This year, NBC has put more than 6,000 hours of coverage online and allowed BuzzFeed to run its Olympics Snapchat channel.

Through to last Tuesday, NBC said, 78 million unique users streamed on the NBC Sports app and NBCOlympics.com, up 24% from same period in London.

The network is reaching more 18-to-49-year-olds on broadcast television during the Olympics than its three broadcast rivals combined, Mr Lazarus said.