Will NBC be able to win back viewers for future Olympics?

Variety

"What better Games to tune out than this one?" says Daniel D'Addario. "Through no fault of NBC or of host nation Japan, it rapidly came to seem the bad-vibes Olympiad. The empty seats in the sports venues seemed a perpetual drain on energy and vitality, and a reminder of the global cataclysm we all had not quite made it through. Ratings for live events from the NBA to the Oscars had collapsed during COVID season, and I’d wager it owes a great deal to the sense of missing production as much as it does to people being more distracted than ever before. What’s an opening ceremony with athletes waving into darkness? What’s a post-win celebration when the victorious swimmer’s splashes echo against hollow vastness? Where was the applause? It sounds silly: People should be able to enjoy live events without having an audience surrogate present. And yet the Olympics play on our most primal emotions: Not merely are they deeply rooted in tradition for older viewers, but they are explicitly modeled on ancient displays of valor meant to elevate members of the community. They’re where the world is supposed to come together, and doing that in abridged form feels alienating and uncanny. I’m not saying the Olympics should have had fans present, or that they shouldn’t have gone on without an audience. But it seems apparent that there was a deflated energy due to particular circumstances that may have accounted for lost viewership, and that spells bad things for cycles in the future. The Olympics — like, for instance, the Academy Awards, which also held a radically altered ceremony this year — need to seem important, meaningful and fun to younger audiences in order to create a new generation of viewership. This broadcast was held back from achieving that in a couple of ways."

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• Closing ceremony was bittersweet, ending the way it opened: "In the end — after all the upheavals, uncertainties, oddities and, of course, glorious moments of competition — the Games got its send-off from Tokyo on Sunday the way it opened: with the only sounds in a near-empty stadium the blaring music and the applause and cheers of athletes and volunteers," says Michelle Ye Hee Lee. "The Closing Ceremonies began with a video looking back at the two weeks of the Games. It acknowledged that there was “more tension than usual' due to the impact of the coronavirus and featured scenes that reflect “how we were able to bring these unprecedented Games to a peaceful close,' according to officials. 'The main focus of the video is not records and scores but the valiant efforts of all the athletes.'"
• Winners (Old-Fashioned Cable Surfing) and Losers (Peacock) of NBC's coverage of the 2020 Tokyo Games: "Incredibly, Peacock’s utter failure to deliver elite streaming Olympics access this time around did clear the way for one (perhaps surprising) winner: Good old-fashioned cable!" says Alexis Gunderson, adding: "Two of the greatest joys of the Olympics, after all, are getting to fall wildly in love with the most random of sports (canoe slalom! handball! trampoline!), and getting to develop sudden and wholesome obsessions with the most unexpected of athletes (Raven Saunders! Tom Daley! Bryce Wettstein!) The thing is, you can’t really do either without a solid dose of serendipity, and as Allison alludes to in her piece on the limitations of streaming, it’s hard to manufacture the same sense of random chance that just… happens when surfing cable television. With NBC Universal running Olympics coverage across NBC, USA, NBC Sports, Telemundo, The Golf Channel and (I’m not kidding) CNBC, though, the very best kind of Olympics serendipity was in full supply for the last couple of weeks. Like, would I have used Peacock to seek out the middle third of the men’s archery qualifiers, or the last heats of the women’s C-1 200m canoe sprint semis, or the back half of the mixed triathlon finals all on my own? No! I absolutely would not have! Did I end up loving every second I watched, after stumbling onto all three? Yes! I absolutely did!"
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