NBC’s Rio Games: The end of the Olympics’ “casual fan” viewership model, and now on to something new

They were the Simone Biles and Usain Bolt Games, or the Ryan Lochte Gas Station Games, or the Michael Phelps, Katie Ledecky and Neymar Games, because, as always, Olympic athletes make the Olympics worth watching.

In the larger view, though, I’m saying–and have said since the Rio Games started–that these will be remembered as the last Casual Fan Games.

The analog way we’ve watched the Olympics and that NBC still prodded us to watch this time… that’s over now. The culture has changed.

People are not going to watch hours and hours of the Olympics, exactly as NBC produces it, just because their parents did or they used to when we were kids.

That’s NBC’s “casual fan” strategy and it worked brilliant for years and years–attract the people who don’t obsess over the NFL-NBA-MLB and just want stories and personalities and the American flag flying high and they don’t care about immediacy or pace.

Oops, the Casual Fan Strategy worked 12 years ago or even 4 years ago… but things have changed.

Social media + shorter attention-spans + millennials and post-millennials + more choices… you know that whole thing… all mean that the Olympics aren’t THE OLYMPICS YOU MUST WATCH BECAUSE YOU ALWAYS WATCH any more.

So the Olympics will have to change right along with the times, if the Olympics and NBC can and want to do it.

I don’t think IOC and NBC want to do it, though, because it means less easy money for them… the same way the deterioration of the print newspaper audience has been incredibly difficult for my industry.

I’m not saying this is easy for anybody. For NBC, for the sponsors, and especially for the most corrupt among the IOC, because the corrupt have set it up this way for a reason–it makes them the most money.
But I really do believe these Games signified the cultural shift that has already happened.

First off, you can’t tape-delay the West Coast feed three hours after the East just to lock up a larger West Coast prime-time “casual fan” market.
It’s insulting and it’s remarkably short-sighted, because if you hold Biles’ final floor exercise until after 11:30 p.m. PT you’re eliminating generations of little kids as viewers this time and that’s thousands and thousands of kids who won’t grow up remembering how special it was.
If you force viewers into the high-cash lanes, test our endurance, and dare us to walk away if we don’t like it, many of us will, indeed, walk.

We have choices. And the ratings dropped.

One more point: Sports means so much in this media age because the drama is usually meaningful, always unscripted and social media becomes an enriching part of it; these are shared experiences unique to sports, and yes, it brings passionate and casual fans together.

If you delay and manipulate the moment, then you’re turning sports into just another scripted drama. We’ve got enough of those, don’t we?


Can you imagine them trying to tape-delay the presidential debates this fall? Or the Super Bowl?

If you can’t do it for those events, you can’t do it for the Olympics now.

And you can’t shove everything good into a three-and-a-half hour window, even if it’s live to the East Coast, and then dump in commercial after commercial and produce the heart-warming features… just to maximize the cash flow.

NBC used to do that and has made an incredible amount of money doing it, but that doesn’t work any more.

Note: NBC’s ratings for these Games started slowly, bounced up during the Phelps-Bolt heights for a few days, then slid back down at the end.

If the Olympics are going to remain as powerful and relevant as they’ve been from about 1984 until now, they’ll have to be different. The delivery model will have to change.

Or else the Olympics will fade away, quicker and quicker every day, as a dominant cultural force the same way so many other Old Media stalwarts have had to adjust or have started to disappear from the landscape.

Flat statement: This will mark the end of the way we view, value and consider the Olympics as consumers, and that’s a big deal because for decades it was always correctly assumed that the Olympics was the grandest, longest, most financially successful showpiece in the universe.

This crystallized for me when I had Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitch on my podcast and he compared NBC’s prime-time coverage to the newspaper print edition.

It made a ton of money, it skewed older and older, and eventually it will be pushed aside as the
culture changes. (My paraphrase.)

* I believe these Games will trigger a change in the way the Olympics are televised and covered into the future.


These Games were bursting with all-timers: Bolt, Phelps,Biles, Kerri Walsh, Kevin Durant and Mo Farah, and the ratings still fell.

* I know NBC has pointed to its live-streaming this year, and I know those numbers were up from the past, and I know this is where it is all headed.

But I also know that NBC doesn’t pay the billions in order to get live-streamers. It does it to get the prime-time audience, and that is going away.

* I believe that the next three Games–all hosted in Asia, with brutal scheduling for US viewership–will be hard-sells for NBC across the board.

If there’s a time for NBC to experiment with new platforms and maybe create a whole new viewing system for the Olympics, it’s now.
* I believe newspaper coverage of the Olympics–which has already been drastically cut back from just 10 years ago due to the woes of the industry–will also have to be adjusted.

The Olympics Media Model is built on the same old captive monster Olympics audience they have always gotten.
This time, they didn’t get it. They didn’t predict it. And yet…
You could’ve seen this one coming.

The people who have determined coverage for years grew up and got into power when the Olympics Ruled Everything… and younger viewers and readers are not so committed to this stale model of the Olympics.

It’s still a great show. But it’s no longer what the programmers think it is.


NBC has had a great run with the old-school model. So did newspapers–a while ago–and it’s over for both of us now.


Tim Kawakami