Live Event Coverage a Big Help to NBC's Olympic Ratings

With the Winter Olympics being in Vancouver, NBC is able to show many events live, and that is helping their ratings big time.

Prime-time coverage Friday and Saturday (Feb. 12-13) averaged 30 million viewers, a third better than the first two nights from Turin, Italy, in 2006 (22.6 million). The opening ceremony on Friday drew 32.6 million viewers, the highest for any Winter Olympics outside the United States since 1994, when the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan saga fueled interest in the games and drew 33.8 million people to the opening ceremony. (The last U.S.-base games, in 2002 in Salt Lake City, scored better than 45 million viewers for the opening ceremony.)

NBC also notes that 97 million people have caught at least a few minutes of its coverage on the network or one of its cable partners, a 13-percent bump over 2006 (88 million) and just behind the 1994 games in Lillehammer, Norway (100 million).

With popular events like figure skating and skiing still to come, the rating are expected to increase over those posted so far.