NBC's Media Experiment Pays Off With Phelps

Around 40 million people watched Michael Phelps win his 10th career gold medal in the 200-meter butterfly Tuesday night, Variety reported Wednesday, with a larger viewing audience for NBC than the opening ceremonies.

"Tuesday's audience repped a 16% increase over Athens in 2004 (29.4 million) and is the best for a non-U.S. Summer Olympics since Barcelona in 1992. Through five nights, the Beijing Games are averaging 31.3 million, up a hefty 21% from Athens (25.8 million)," writes Rick Kissel.

NBC's coverage of the Beiijing Olympics has received quite a bit of press in itself over the past few weeks.  Today AP reports that in their massive experiment in various forms of media, NBC is seeing new habits forming, particularly with mobile phones.

According to NBC, about half of the people using mobile phones to watch the Olympics are doing so for the very first time.

And there were around 1.7 million online video streams of another Phelps victory in Monday's swimming relay.

As long as this boy from Baltimore keeps them coming in, it looks like NBC will flourish... at least in swimming events.  But who's watching archery and table tennis? 

Phelps helps score ratings gold [Variety]

by Chris Snyder for Wired.com

Also on Wired.com:
Netflix Suffers First Major Outage
Military AI Could Rule the Internet
Female-Oriented Sites Become Hot Properties

Subscribe to Wired magazine