In 2011, it agreed to pay $4.38 billion to show the four Olympics from 2014 to 2020.
And on Tuesday, the network said it would begin its Winter Olympics broadcast next February a day before the opening ceremony, with a prime-time broadcast from Sochi, Russia, that will feature two new events — team figure skating and slopestyle snowboarding — as well as women’s freestyle moguls.
NBC said it would be the first time a broadcaster in the United States had started its prime-time programming ahead of the opening ceremony.
“It’s a great way to jump-start the Olympics,” Mark Lazarus, chairman of the NBC Sports Group, said during a news conference.
The opportunity to add the extra night on Thursday, Feb. 6, was made possible with the International Olympic Committee’s addition of 12 events to the Winter Games program, which prompts an 18th day of competition.
Lazarus said that the network’s rating and viewership for the added night would not be included in its cumulative 17-night performance, in part because there were no comparisons to past Olympics. It is possible that Olympic programming the night before the opening ceremony will draw a favorable rating. But if it is disappointing, NBC will not have to add it to its overall rating.
All the sports events from Sochi will be shown live at NBCOlym-pics.com, and more than half the events, including every United States hockey game and curling match, will be shown live somewhere amid NBC’s cluster of broadcast and cable networks.
But the nine-hour time difference between Sochi and the United States’ Eastern time zone means that the prime-time broadcasts will be shown on a delay.
One result of NBC’s research from the 2012 London Summer Games was that carrying Olympic events live digitally helped to build, rather than to diminish, the prime-time audience even if viewers had already watched the contests on computers, smartphones or tablets.
“The more content out there, the more prime-time viewing,” said Gary Zenkel, president of NBC Olympics.
Lazarus said that he was hopeful that the N.H.L., whose games are carried by NBC, would agree to send its players to Sochi.
“They’re a global league with many players from Russia,” he said, “and they have a TV partner that knows how to manage their product.”
Lazarus said he expected NBC to make a profit at the Sochi Games. NBC earned a small profit from the London Olympics after early predictions of a loss as high as $200 million.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/sports/olympics/nbcs-2014-olympic-broadcasts-to-begin-a-day-early.html?partner=rss&emc=rss