Traditional TV Remains Fav For Olympics Viewing

For the 2018 Olympic Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, NBC is making a big push with digital broadcasting, livestreaming 1,800 hours of coverage — what the network called a record for a Winter Olympics. But more than three-quarters of likely U.S. viewers say they plan to watch the games through traditional television broadcasts.

In a Morning Consult poll, conducted among 2,201 U.S. adults, 62 percent, or 1,354 people, said they were very or somewhat likely to watch the games. The margin of error for the overall poll is plus or minus 2 percentage points.

Of the 1,354 likely viewers, 78 percent said they plan to watch the games only or mostly on television, compared to 14 percent who said they will split their viewing equally between TV and online and 7 percent who said they will watch mostly or only online. The subsample has a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

For all the radical change that’s going on regarding how people watch TV, there are still an “awful lot” of people who watch TV the old-fashioned way: on a television set, said Robert Thompson, professor of television and popular culture at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. That number increases with a global event such as the Olympics.

“These are not just television shows,” Thompson said in a Feb. 8 phone interview. “They’re rituals, and a TV set makes a better altar on which to consume a ritual than a mobile device.”

Livestreaming is a time commitment to a full event, while the TV broadcasts that NBC will air in the United States are “not quite highlight reels, but certainly compressed,” Thompson said.