New York -- Gary Zenkel, president, NBC Olympics and operations & strategy, NBC Sports Group, and Ron Lamprecht, executive VP, digital distribution, NBCUniversal Content Distribution, discussed the success of NBC’s recent Olympic coverage in Sochi during a panel at the On Demand Summit Thursday in New York.
This year’s Winter Olympic Games led to a record-setting 2.12 million unique TV Everywhere views during the U.S. vs. Canada men’s ice hockey semifinal, and the Sochi Games' overall 24.6 million total video viewers was a 160% increase over the 2010 Vancouver Games and an 8% increase over the 2012 London Olympics.
NBC has had comprehensive rights to Olympics coverage since 1996, and the company’s online coverage has evolved drastically since a paragraph detailing “interactive media” was included in the original contract negotiation.
“We have always had rights to all platforms to the Olympics,” said Zenkel. “We’ve always taken the position that we want to make as much content available to as many platforms as possible. It was really a matter of technology catching up to our ambition.”
