It's not that the viewers dislike the Olympics, just NBC's toilet coverage.
In 2014 NBC Universal paid an astonishing $7.75 Billion for exclusive rights to the Olympic games through 2032. Based on the viewership numbers from this summer's games that's not exactly money well spent. Compared to the London Olympics of 2012 viewership among the prime demographic of 18-49 year olds dropped by 25% this has caused quite a bit of alarm for both the Network and the many advertisers desperate to target this key segment of the population. NBC execs were quick to slam Millennials for being too busy with their noses in Facebook, Snapchat and Pokemon to notice that the games were taking place. Nonsense. What NBC is really having a hard time understanding is that their coverage is absolute, utter, complete, outright, unadulterated, festering, putrefied garbage. While much of the sports coverage in the US tends to focus on slightly different angles than the rest of the world is used to, NBC has concocted a formula that they have been refining for years one that can take sport, condense it, remove the sport from it and somehow sell it as general entertainment to the masses. In fact they really don't see the sport, the athleticism, the achievement in excellence as being worth peoples time. Instead it is a condiment used to spice up a generic entertainment package. As someone who grew up watching European sports coverage, I became rather disillusioned trying to follow the same events through US media. Firstly there are the commercials, a relentless deluge of brands and services stuffed right into our faces at any opportunity. If the media could getaway with sticking a six second pharmaceutical ad between the firing of the gun and the finish line of the 100 Metre final you bloody well know they would. A great example here is the opening ceremony in Rio. Not a particularly good one especially in comparison to Danny Boyle's magnificent opener in London but pleasant viewing all the same. That is, unless you had the displeasure of watching it on NBC. The commercial interruptions were relentless, the studio punditry atrocious. In fact there were a total of five commercial breaks slotted into the first 30 minutes of the opening ceremony. No surprise then that so many viewers started doing laundry or cleaning out the garage for a superior form of entertainment. More resilient Olympic fans flocked to the web where they could access uninterrupted foreign coverage through the glorious use of proxy's and VPN's. A trend that continued throughout the games despite NBC's efforts to stream events through their own lousy commercially interrupted service. It was online that many American's noticed the other key difference between international and domestic Olympic Coverage. There was actual coverage. In a plot probably conceived by Ming the Merciless to bring the most powerful nation on Earth to it's knees, his television network cronies had decided that sport should play second fiddle to that general entertainment formula mentioned earlier. Sport it appears cannot be fully understood by the unwashed masses without what the Network calls "Context". The achievement of somebody doing something faster or better than any human in history doesn't really mean anything unless there is some sob story to accompany it. NBC thought they had it all worked out, one Network executive nailed their general entertainment strategy on the head when he said: "The people who watch the Olympics are not particularly sports fans. More women watch the Games than men, and for the women, they’re less interested in the result and more interested in the journey. It’s sort of like the ultimate reality show and mini-series wrapped into one. And to tell the truth, it has been the complaint of a few sports writers. It has not been the complaint of the vast viewing public." Yet they are still scratching their heads in bemusement at losing a vast chunk of that viewing public? It might actually work if the journey was something worth following but instead we are treated t…