Beijing Games To Break TV Records
The International Olympic Committee has stated that the Beijing Olympics is likely to become the most widely broadcast event in the history of the Games.
More than half of China’s 1.3 billion people turned on to watch at least some part of the opening ceremony.
On the back of this viewing success, the IOC expects its revenue to increase for future Games.
Timo Lumme, the IOC’s director of TV and marketing, reeled off a series of impressive figures at an Olympic news conference including a likely total viewing figure of around 1.2bn people.
He said that by the end of the Beijing Games, three times more TV and online material would have been broadcast than at the Athens Games in 2004.
In China alone, a total of 842m people tuned in to at least some of the opening ceremony. More than 1 bn Chinese people have watched at least one Olympic event.
In the United States, more than 40m viewers watched swimmer Michael Phelps win his eighth gold medal – the biggest Saturday night audience since 1990.
The IOC earned a total of $2.6bn (£1.4bn) from TV rights revenue for the winter Games in Turin in 2006 and the Beijing Olympics.
That figure is expected to jump to about $3.9bn for the Vancouver winter Games in 2010 and the next summer Games, in London in 2012.
