Sharp drop in NBC’s ratings for Rio opening ceremony

NBC easily dominated the Friday ratings with the Opening Ceremony for the Rio Games, but the ratings were down from London four years ago.

Some 85,000 troops and police officers are involved in providing security at the Games in the city of Rio, which is known for its high crime rate.

Compared to the awe-inspiring and extravagant opening ceremony in Beijing in 2008 and the star studded one in London in 2012, the 2016 Rio Olympics kicked off with a relatively low key ceremony.

The first medal of the Games will be picked up in shooting on Saturday but hopes and dreams will also be fulfilled-or shattered-for cyclists, fencers, weightlifters, jodokas, swimmers, and archers as the first Olympic titles are determined.

That followed the detonation of another unattended bag near the same spot on Friday evening during the opening ceremony for the Games. As readers familiar with his earlier work, especially Futebol Nation: A Footballing History of Brazil, would expect, the text is edgy, with the tension created by the parallel narratives of the awe-inspiring achievements of sportspersons and the machinations of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), domestic organising committees, host nations and cheat machines (particularly the doping network). These are known as “makegoods” in the TV business.

Members of the United States team take part in the Opening Ceremony of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games at Maracana Stadium on August 5, 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

NBC executives anticipated a drop-off in the ratings after that moment.

Actual viewership figures will be released later in the day on Saturday.

The London audience translated into 40.7 million viewers.

Additionally, the NBC stream – the first one ever for an opening ceremony – generated 42 million minutes of tune-in. Such criteria ignored wrestling’s connect to the ancient Olympics, the great geographic arc of its popularity, from the U.S.to Russian Federation, to Iran and India and onwards, as well as the smell of the earth that its stars uniquely bring to the Summer Games.

A Netherland’s fan cheers during the men’s field hockey Argentina vs Netherlands match of the Rio 2016 Olympics Games at the Olympic Hockey Centre in Riode Janeiro on August, 6 2016.

Some viewers were critical of NBC’s decision to tape-delay the event instead of showing it live.

But NBC was making a business calculation. We are a for-profit organization, and we spend a lot of money to put on the Olympics, and I think [we have] the right – and duty to our shareholders – to make some revenue from that.