NEW YORK — Highlights from media coverage of the Pyeongchang Olympics:
NEW YORK — Highlights from media coverage of the Pyeongchang Olympics:
RATINGS: If the ratings were an Olympic race, NBC slipped a few seconds off its pace on Wednesday. The Nielsen company said 19.2 million people watched competition in prime time on NBC, the cable network NBCSN and through streaming services, down 8 percent from the 20.8 million who watched NBC for the corresponding night at the Sochi Olympics four years ago. An estimated 17.2 million watched NBC alone, or 17 percent off Sochi.
PRIME TIME PLUS: NBC decided this year to air its Olympic telecast at the same time across the country, and that paid off for West Coast viewers in the U.S. with Thursday’s competition in Korea. They were able to see Mikaela Shiffrin win her giant slalom gold medal live in a prime viewing window, right before 10 p.m. Pacific on Wednesday. In past years, West Coast viewers were stuck watching reruns of an East Coast feed that aired three hours earlier.
TRYING AGAIN: NBC prepared a strong feature on American snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis , a four-time Olympian sadly known best to many for falling while making an unnecessary jump at the end of a race she was dominating, costing her a sure gold medal in the 2006 Turin Games. Curiously, producers aired it around 1 a.m. Thursday on the East Coast, right before a men’s qualifying round in snowboarding. Let’s hope it gets another life around the time she competes, because anyone who sees the story will want to root for her.
SKI TIME: Cross-country isn’t one of the sexy sports, at least when it comes to television attention. But the women’s 10-kilometer freestyle race was a thrill and, despite its complexities, easy to understand. Analyst Chad Salmela deserves much of the credit. He and viewers tried to will Jessica Diggins over the finish line to earn the USA’s first Olympic medal in the sport. She fell less than four seconds short in a 25-minute race and was a refreshing interview afterward, refusing to consider it any kind of a defeat.
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More AP Olympic coverage: https://wintergames.ap.org
