NBC's Actions Speak Louder Than Words

A common complaint about NBC's coverage of the Olympics is that the network devotes too much time to canned, overly sentimental features, mostly about American athletes. But if Thursday night's prime-time telecast is any indication, such gripes are off the mark.

In its four hours of prime-time coverage Thursday night, NBC broadcast only two features -- one on U.S. snowboard cross gold medalist Seth Wescott , and the other on Russian figure skating gold medalist Evgeni Plushenko -- for a total of 4 minutes 38 seconds. The Wescott feature, which ran first and had a running time of 2:35, was not aired until more than two hours into the telecast.

Roughly 2 hours 38 minutes were used for actual coverage of the sports (on Thursday night, it was the men's figure skating final, the men's snowboard cross heats and final and the women's skeleton heats and final).

For our purposes, "actual coverage" is coverage that is broadcast from the venues, including interviews, replays and shots of celebration. For example, during the seven minutes NBC devoted to the snowboard cross final, only about three minutes were for the actual race, with the rest going to replays and celebration.

According to Mike McCarley , vice president of sports communications for NBC, the network averaged about six features a night during the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney. But the network has cut back on its Olympic features during the Games it has televised since then, the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City and the 2004 Summer Games in Athens.

"There's more of an emphasis to get more sports on the air," McCarley said in an interview. "The storytelling aspect is still very important, but now the onus of the storytelling falls on the commentators, to provide it during the competition.

"We listened to what viewers wanted, and they wanted more competition. They still wanted to know about the athletes, but you want to stay at the venue, you don't want to go away for a long period of time."

The changes have not helped NBC in the ratings. With 31.1 million viewers on Wednesday night, Fox's "American Idol" handily beat NBC's Olympics coverage, which garnered 15.4 million viewers. Through the first six nights of the Games, overall prime-time viewership of the Olympics was down 36 percent from the first six nights of the 2002 Salt Lake City Games and 17 percent from the Nagano Games in 1998, according to USA Today.

But the ratings gap may start to close when coverage of the women's figure skating competition, which typically garners large numbers of viewers, begins on Tuesday.

-- Matt Bonesteel