NBC’s ratings for the Winter Olympics hit a record low

The 2022 Winter Olympics are taking place right now—and they might need to remind you of them, given the ratings numbers NBC seems to be pulling for this event. Bloomberg Reports tonight The 2022 Games in Beijing are currently set to receive the worst television viewing in Olympic history, currently working in nearly half of the 2018 Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea four years ago.

To be fair to NBC, she clearly knew things weren’t going to be brilliant This year’s go to games; The network, which paid $7.75 billion in 2014 to secure broadcast rights to the games through 2032, King Already issued notices to advertisers before the games start Expect a lower than average ROI for any big bags of money they have spent on advertising. (Among other things, NBC has gone above and beyond in offering its usual expensive guarantees of certain viewing levels to major advertisers.)

There were a few key factors people used to explain the decline. First, there is a full political and diplomatic angle, in which the United States has refused to send official representatives to China to attend the Games, citing human rights violations including the Chinese government’s treatment of the Uyghur people living within its borders. On a more complex level, the time zone difference between the US and China means that NBC must choose between broadcasting events in the middle of the night, or shutting down until prime time (as results are widely spread online).). All this was exacerbated by the epidemic of all that; Viewership of the Summer Games in Japan last year also plummeted, hitting record lows.

However, there are some caveats here. First, “low ratings” doesn’t mean that NBC didn’t knock out Seven Kinds of Hell among all the other prime-time shows last week; Few people might watch it, but these are still the Olympics we’re talking about. And Bloomberg It quoted NBCUniversal’s head of advertising as saying that despite losing regular ratings, the company expects to recover much of its advertising revenue by streaming games across Peacock and other platforms. That might be the way forward, however: Focusing on streaming is all about the exact timezone issue, and it’s also in line with the ways many people prefer to experience gaming in the first place.

For now, the 2022 Games are set to head towards a record low; We will have to wait until 2024, in Paris, to see if this shift is more permanent.