The ratings—and/or the highly speculative guesswork—are in, and it turns out a billion people watched the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, over 34 million of them in the U.S. (That’s a smaller percentage of our population, but to be fair, much of the rest of the world’s population doesn’t have Cartoon Network.)
Beyond that, the opening weekend of the Games is looking like an unqualified ratings success. So is it possible that all the hand-wringing about Internet live feeds of events like the Opening Ceremonies—and NBC’s heavy-handed attempts to quash them—were misguided? I’ll wager you that plenty of people who caught part or all of the ceremonies online (like me) tuned in Friday night anyway to see the spectacle on a big screen. Why not regard that as publicity for the flagship broadcast of the Games? Better yet, why wouldn’t NBC just make the livecast available at its website, and monetize it with advertising as best as it could? I suspect it would be an easier sell to advertisers than The Office webisodes.
The networks had better accept change and figure out how to sell live webcasts of the Games eventually, because by the London Games in 2012 (Vancouver 2010 will at least be closer to American time zones), the holes in that dam are only going to get bigger.