TELEVISION AND ONLINE:THE INTERNATIONAL Olympic Committee (IOC) looks set to win its own gold medal for success in beaming the Beijing Games into people's homes. These Olympics will be the most viewed Games in their 112-year history, with 4.5 billion people tuning in on TV and online.
IOC director of television and marketing services Timo Lumme told a news conference that viewership had been given a major boost by online platforms.
For the IOC, the spectacular audience data will vindicate its decision to award the Games to Beijing, despite concerns over its human-rights record. The Beijing organisers have since failed to honour promises about improving press freedoms in China, but the IOC said it was all about engagement, and in that context, the Games had been a success.
"The Beijing Games look set to become the biggest broadcasted event in Olympic history. Ratings are higher than for any Olympics before," said Lumme.
The opening ceremony on August 8th has already gone down as the highest sports-related broadcast event in China, with a record 840 million viewers, and is expected to have been seen by more than 1.2 billion people worldwide when final figures come in.
Viewing figures in key regions, including the US, were promising and would eclipse records set for Athens 2004, the IOC said.
NBC, which paid over €600 million for exclusive rights to the Games, chalked up 40 million viewers, its largest Saturday night audience in 18 years, when it broadcast Michael Phelps's record-breaking eighth Olympic gold medal-winning swim, he said.
Significantly, the Beijing Games were tipped to exceed overall US ratings for the Atlanta Games in 1996, which were broadcast at much more suitable times for American audiences.
British viewers also tuned in in a big way to see Britain's biggest gold medal haul in a century, while Indian viewers cheered on their country's first individual gold at the Beijing Games.
Lumme said there was an unprecedented amount of Olympic sports content available, some 5,000 hours of coverage provided by 200 countries through rights-holding broadcast partners.
By the end of the Beijing Games, three times more TV and online material would have been broadcast than at Athens.
The IOC's average viewer age profile is greying rapidly, and in a bid to encourage a younger audience, the committee introduced an Olympic channel on YouTube showing daily clips.
Lumme said the use of the Internet for Games broadcasts had been a big success, with the NBCOlympics.com website alone recording 30 times more video views than in Athens, viewing more than 22 million clips.
In China alone more than 102 million people watched the Games live on line, Lumme said.
Many more watched recorded segments.
The success of the Games means a bigger bill for China's state broadcaster CCTV in future to reflect its growing influence and scale, said Lumme. CCTV's bill for Beijing was just €12.5 million, but Lumme said he believed that they could be looking at well into three figures for the next Games, and that's just for China.
The IOC earned a total of €1.8 billion from the winter Games in Turin in 2006 and the Beijing event.
That figure is forecast to jump to about €2.6 billion for the Vancouver winter Games in 2010 and the next summer Games, in London in 2012.
