More than half of Asia-Pacific‘s population tuned in and 842 million people in China watched some TV coverage of the Olympics’ opening ceremony on 080808. At least 80% of Chinese households or over 1 billion people have watched the CCTV’s Olympic broadcasts. Chinese President Hu Jintao was there to lend his support at the women’s team table tennis final, an event which drew 330 million TV viewers according to CSM Media Research.
China’s state-owned CCTV paid less than $17 million for exclusive broadcast rights (through the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union) but could rake in $394 million in Olympic advertising revenue, according to media firm Group M. In contrast, NBC paid almost $894 million for U.S. broadcast rights and is expected to fetch $1 billion in ads.
NBC posted the largest TV audience in 18 years as over 40 million viewers in the US tuned in to catch Michael Phelps win his record 8th gold medal at one Games. Based on the first 10-days, more than 196 million viewers have watched some portion of the games, making the Beijing Olympics the 4th most-watched event in U.S. history.
The Seven Network reported that 17 million Australians have watched the Beijing Games on television, outpacing viewership for the Sydney Games.
China Mobile reported that from August 1 to August 19, the company’s WAP platform – “Handheld Olympics” service has drawn more than 8 million visitors and 300 mln page views. The site receives 13 mln page views daily and peaked at 30 mln page views per day.
In addition to staggering viewership numbers, Beijing Olympics 2008 will also be remembered as the BOB – not ‘battle of the bulge’ but “Battle of Online Broadcasts” as viewership has been significantly boosted by unprecedented digital media reach and coverage.
According to Nielsen Online, Yahoo’s Olympics site averaged 4.7 million unique visits each day through August 18 while NBC had 4.2 million over the same period. eMarketer expects online video ad spending to surge 55.9% to $505 million this year.
NBC’s Olympics.com is receiving 30 times more video views than it did in Athens and 12 times more mobile phone clip downloads than it did for the winter Games in Turin in 2006. In the first 12 days of the Beijing Olympics, users of NBC’s Web site had watched more than 56 million video streams—more than the combined total for the previous 2 Games.
Over the first 12 days of the Games, 102 million people in China logged on to CCTV.com for live broadcast over streaming video while another 146 million watched via delayed video on demand. In India, there were 12 million online video views of shooter Abhinav Bindra winning the country’s 1st ever individual gold medal.
In France, an average of 1.4 million people watched the Games on TV every day. Audience rating reached 25.3% on average from the first day of the Olympics. Visits to the Olympic contents on the French State TV channels’ websites also topped 3.5 million and a daily average of 200,000 people watched live broadcasting of the events via the internet.
