Edwards's Mea Culpa Merits a Mere Blip Against NBC and Beijing

How clever of John Edwards to make himself available last Friday to do his did-I-ever-make-some-kind-of-serious-mistake-or-what? wife-cheating confession exclusively for ABC News, which would then air it in the teeth of NBC's broadcast of the Beijing Summer Olympics Opening Ceremonies.

As Edwards's luck would have it, the wonderfully panda-and-dragon-free ceremonies drew the biggest audience ever for an Olympic opening not held in the United States -- a whopping 34 million viewers. That represented about 19 percent of the country's homes with TVs or, put another way, about 34 percent of the homes in which TVs were turned on at that time.

"Nightline" appears to have copped about 2.6 percent of the available TV homes Friday night in the so-called metered markets (the top 56 markets in the country). Or, if you prefer, the newsmag snared about 5 percent of the homes where TVs were turned on at that time.

While that may not sound like much, the previous week, against no Olympics competition, "Nightline" logged an only slightly better 2.8 percent of the country's homes in the metered markets.

And though comparisons between the household ratings in the metered markets and the actual number of viewers of the show nationally can be dicey -- national stats won't be out until Thursday -- "Nightline" has averaged about 3 million viewers over the past month's worth of Fridays. So it's probably safe to say around 3 million people watched Edwards point out to Bob Woodruff that when he had the affair with his "videographer," his wife Elizabeth's cancer was in remission.

Though we're guessing ABC would have rather aired its big scoop out of the path of the Opening Ceremonies, for "Nightline" to have held onto its Friday numbers is a victory of sorts for the show and speaks to viewers' interest in the sexual indiscretions of the non-presidential candidate/non-officeholder.

The Beijing extravaganza mowed down everything else in its path. ABC may have done just as well in late night as it did in prime time (2.8 million viewers) with a "Samantha Who?" rerun and the flick "War of the Worlds." In fact, "Nightline" seems to have been on par with the prime-time performances of the other broadcast networks, including CBS (3.5 million viewers with "Ghost Whisperer," Numb3rs" and "Swingtown"), Fox's broadcast of "Hellboy" (2.3 million) and CW's "SmackDown!" (3.6 million).

About 107 million people in the United States sampled the first Sunday of the Beijing Games across all of NBC Universal's broadcast and cable networks, making it the most sampled first Sunday in Summer Olympics history.

That number includes 81 million who checked out the NBC broadcast network alone during prime time that day. NBC was the go-to network to see swimmer Michael Phelps and his teammates win his second gold medal of these Games and his eighth career Olympic gold medal.

The more than 1 million video streams of that USA gold-medal relay accessed at NBCOlympics.com suggests the two information sources are mutually supporting each other rather than cannibalizing each other's audience.

For the record books, the NBC broadcast network averaged 30.4 million viewers Sunday in prime time -- actually from 7 to 11:45 p.m. That's the best prime-time average audience through the first Sunday for a non-U.S. Summer Games since Montreal in 1976, when the words "audience fragmentation" had not yet become the most feared phrase in the executive suites of the networks.

Time for the NBC Fine Print: The 107 million viewers who sampled the Games on one of the NBC Universal networks -- NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Oxygen (yes, really), etc. -- and the 81 million who checked out the NBC broadcast network in prime time Sunday are "reach" figures and measure anyone who watched as little as six minutes of a telecast. These are of great bragging interest to the network presenting big-ticket programs such as the Olympics; they're also of enormous interest to advertisers. That's because conventional wisdom says anyone who watches six minutes of a telecast probably was subjected to an ad break.

The 30.4 million who watched NBC represents the "average audience," meaning the average number of viewers watching each minute. That's the standard typically used to discuss programming on television.