NBC to Air 450 Hours of Olympic Coverage on Cable

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NBCUniversal will be giving its cable networks a big helping of Olympics programming when it covers the Winter Games from PyeongChang, South Korea.

NBCSN will have 368.5 hours of the 450 hours of Olympic coverage that will be televised on cable starting Feb. 7. The amount of coverage on NBCSN is up 60% from 230 hours during the 2014 winter games from Sochi, Russia.

Also carrying Olympic programming are NBCU’s CNBC and USA Network.

For the first time, NBCSN will be live in primetime nearly every night throughout the game. Viewers will have a choice of watching live coverage on NBCSN or Olympic programming broadcast on NBC.

NBCSN will televise gold medal finals for events including men’s and women’s hockey, snowboarding short-track skating, luge, biathlon, ski jumping and bobsled. The network will be all-Olympics all the time for 156 consecutive hours from Feb. 18 to Feb. 25.

CNBC will have 46 hours of Olympic programming, including extensive coverage of curling.

Curling will air from 5-8 p.m. ET most days. The network will present the gold medal final of mixed doubled curling on Feb. 13.

Live primetime men’s and women’s hockey coverage will air form 10p.m. to 12:30 am ET on Feb. 14-16 and Feb. 20.

USA Network will air live curling and hockey as part of its 40.5 hours of live programming. Most days, USA will have Olympic programming from 7-930 am ET. On some days, USA will be on the Olympics from 2:30 to 9:30 AM.

Last month, NBC Sports said it expected to see a double-digit rise in advertising sales for the South Korea games from the Socci games four years ago.

The Sochi games generated about $850 million in ad revenue.

NBC is selling this Olympic based on Nielsen’s People 2+ metric instead of households. The People 2+ is more comparable to digital metrics, and NBC is selling its TV and digital coverage of the games together.

NBC is also selling based on Total Audience Delivery, which includes both TV viewership and online and mobile.

In addition to cable NBC will be covering the Olympic online and has formed partnership with Buzzfeed and Snapchat.

Jon Lafayette
Jon Lafayette

Jon has been business editor of Broadcasting+Cable since 2010. He focuses on revenue-generating activities, including advertising and distribution, as well as executive intrigue and merger and acquisition activity. Just about any story is fair game, if a dollar sign can make its way into the article. Before B+C, Jon covered the industry for TVWeek, Cable World, Electronic Media, Advertising Age and The New York Post. A native New Yorker, Jon is hiding in plain sight in the suburbs of Chicago.