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