NBC Hails Strong Performance of Olympics Coverage

BEIJING, August 11: With a record 114 million total
viewers in its first two days of coverage from Beijing, NBC Universal maintains
that this year’s Olympics is on pace to be the most watched in history.

The first two days of the Beijing games netted four
million more viewers in the U.S. than Atlanta in 1996 and nearly 20 million
more than Athens. NBC Universal’s coverage on Saturday reached 92 million
viewers. The two-day average of 29.1 million viewers and a rating of 16.2/30 is
the best prime-time rating through the first Saturday for a non-U.S. Summer
Olympics since Montreal in 1976 (22.1/46) and a 22-percent jump from Athens in
2004 (13.3/25).

NBCU also reported strong viewership on its dedicated
NBCOlympics.com website, which garnered 62.7 million page views on Saturday, an
increase of 475 percent from the opening day of competition of the Athens
games. Over the weekend NBCOlympics.com totaled 132.6 million page views.

In China, meanwhile, the Opening Ceremony is said to have
recorded some 842 million viewers, a 69-percent share of the population.

Coverage in Europe, however, was impacted by the time
difference, according to Eurodata TV Worldwide, as compared with the Athens
event. The Opening Ceremony secured 4.8 million viewers on BBC One, while
France 2 scored some 4.9 million viewers. In Spain, 4.1 million tuned in to
TVE1, while in Germany ARD attracted 7.7 million. On Rai Due, there were a
reported 5.4 million viewers, Eurodata indicates.

—By Mansha Daswani