Coverage of Olympic Games Delivers a Win for NBC

A network buys the rights to the Olympics to beat its prime-time competition for 17 nights in a row. It doesn’t always fulfill its mission. But NBC did during the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

That, in part, means that the other networks did not put up much of a fight and that former Olympics-beaters like “American Idol” do not have their former potency. Still, if you’re the Olympic network -- as NBC is -- you take your victories and celebrate them. Mark Lazarus, chairman of NBC Sports Group, said that NBC would profit from the Sochi Games. NBC averaged 21.4 million viewers a night. That is dandy by anyone’s standard -- it is like carrying “Sunday Night Football,” which averaged 21.7 million viewers last season, every night. The Sochi figures are 6 percent better than NBC’s average of 20.2 million viewers at the 2006 Turin Winter Games, which, like Sochi, prevented NBC from carrying events live in prime time. Between the Turin Games and the Sochi Games, the Winter Games in Vancouver averaged 24.4 million viewers, largely because the competitions were primarily live in prime time.