Mike Tirico is replacing Bob Costas as host of NBC’s primetime Olympics coverage, which starts Thursday from Pyeongchang, South Korea. Costas hosted 11 Olympics starting in 1992 until he stepped down last year. He became as identified with the event as Jim McKay was for an earlier generation. “I’m taking the approach of I’m following him, not replacing him,” Tirico said. “You don’t replace someone like Bob.”
The Winter Games in South Korea begin just four days after Super Bowl LII. Two years of aggressive strategy pays off for its ad sales team
Olympics veterans Bruce Beck, Brian Curtis, Katie Kim, JC Monahan, Kevin Nathan, Eun Yang and news anchors/reporters from 10 markets travel to South Korea to cover the XXIII Winter Olympics and deliver unique content across all station platforms including television, digital and social.
NBC is banking heavily on the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics since traditional TV ratings have slumped in recent years. Live sports are marquee TV events that draw most of the largest TV audiences, but even those ratings have declined. More Americans are dumping their cable packages — Comcast lost 33,000 video customers in the fourth quarter and 151,000 for all of 2017 — and advertisers are following consumers to their phones.
Marking another technological advancement for NBC Olympics, NBCUniversal’s comprehensive coverage of the XXIII Olympic Winter Games from PyeongChang, South Korea, will include the availability of 4K High Dynamic Range (HDR) to cable, satellite, telco providers, and other partners.
Exclusives
For the first time, NBC will stream the opening ceremonies of the 2018 Winter Olympics live. While NBC has been quick to embrace online streaming in its coverage of Olympics sporting events, it has held back its coverage of the popular opening ceremonies, preferring instead to air them on a delay in prime time with commentary explaining the action.
Katie Couric will return to NBC next month as co-host of the Winter Olympics opening ceremony from PyeongChang, South Korea, giving the former Today co-anchor her fourth stint in a unique TV event. Couric will co-host the live broadcast with NBC Sports’ Mike Tirico on Feb. 9.
NBC expects $1.4 billion in ad revenue from the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics, the payoff for its huge investment in sports programming. The figure includes $900 million for the Olympics in South Korea, which start Feb. 9. Ad prices for the event are running higher than the 2014 winter games in Sochi, Russia, NBC executives said today on a conference call. The network is charging more than $5 million for a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl, in line with the past couple of years.
NBC will present more than 50 hours of virtual-reality coverage from the 2018 Winter Olympics next month in South Korea — available live to viewers in the U.S. It will mark the first time that Olympic programming in VR will be delivered live in the U.S on a wide range of devices and platforms, and the first time that any Winter Olympics has been in VR.
NBC has built a 3,500 square foot geodesic dome as the main studio for its coverage of the upcoming PyeongChang Winter Olympics in February. The unique domed set will include a 40-foot by 16-foot LED video wall from Leyard, complemented by 18 55-inch high-definition monitors and more than 15 standup locations. Also included in the design are a primary anchor desk, interview areas and news update desk.
Russia has been barred from the 2018 Olympic games following a report regarding “the systematic manipulation of the anti-doping system in Russia,” the International Olympic Committee said Tuesday.
NBC plans to stream more than 1,800 hours of content during its coverage of the 2018 Winter Olympics from PyeongChang, South Korea, next year. That’s almost twice what the network streamed in the 2014 Winter games — just over 1,000 hours of footage, which also marked the first time that every event was streamed online.
Pyeongchang lies in mountainous terrain at the uppermost eastern corner of South Korea, about an hour from the border with North Korea. Normally, its proximity to the Demilitarized Zone, and the North beyond, would not be an issue. But six months from now, thousands of athletes from around the world are set to gather at that remote location for the 2018 Winter Olympics. Much can change, either good or bad, as the clock ticks down to the opening ceremony Feb. 9.
With the network’s broadcast of Super Bowl LII approximately 10 months away, NBC has already set to work to fill the game’s ad roster. To soothe advertisers nervous about the cost of coming up with a Super Bowl commercial, executives are suggesting NBC will work with them to make the glitzy ads work in both the Feb. 4 NFL championship as well as the parent company’s telecast of the Winter Olympics, which is slated to follow just four days later.
It’s only 287 days until the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics, but nearly 100 of the U.S. team’s top athletes have assembled this week at a Los Angeles production facility. Welcome to “WeHo,” the conglomerate’s hush-hush weeklong event that brought together 96 top athletes — 10 months before the 2018 Winter Games.
NBC will present all of its coverage of the 2018 Winter Olympic Games live across all U.S. time zones. By syncing viewing on its broadcast, cable and digital platforms, the broadcast network will end its long-standing practice of tape-delayed presentations to the Mountain and Pacific regions. It’s a move made in deference to the digital age and our collective hunger for instantaneous information and gratification.
NBC expects ad sales for next year’s Winter Olympic in PyeongChang, South Korea, to exceed those for the 2014 winter games in Sochi, Russia. “We’re pacing a little bit ahead of where we were going into Sochi,” NBCUniversal sports ad-sales chief Dan Lovinger said Wednesday.
NBC’s primetime coverage of the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, will air live across the United States, including on the West Coast, a first since the Games became a major television attraction in the late 1960s.
Bob Costas has been the on-air concierge to NBC’s Olympics 11 times, starting in 1992. Costas, 64, said he’s not retiring from the business, but entering the “Tom Brokaw phase” of his career. He will be replaced at the South Korea Winter Games next year by Mike Tirico.
NBCUniversal heads into the next three Olympics — all of them in Asia — faced with a critical question: Was the lower-than-expected primetime viewership for the just-completed Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro a fluke or a harbinger of fraying audiences over the next six years? The answer, for now, is unknown, as NBC prepares for the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo and the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing (which hosted the Summer Olympics eight years ago).
