Beijing 2008 Ratings Bonanza

International Olympic Committee (IOC) officials hailed the 2008 Beijing Games as "the biggest broadcast event in Olympics history" hours ahead of the closing ceremony on August 24. The Games this year have been broadcast to more people living in more regions of the world than ever before, IOC President Jacques Rogge told reporters at his closing press conference.

Around 5,000 hours of Olympic coverage have been available to rights holding broadcasters in more than 200 countries and territories, triple the volume of coverage available during the Athens Games. Timo Lumme, the IOC director of television and marketing services, provided the figures at a press conference on August 20.

"A staggering 842 million people in China tuned in to watch the Opening Ceremony," said Lumme. "Ratings for the opening ceremony in particular surpassed the opening ceremonies for Sydney and Athens in major markets around the world."

The TV audience numbers have set a new record for the Olympics, according to an August 24 report from Nielsen. Around 4.4 billion people around the world watched the first 10 days of the Games, almost two-thirds of the world’s population. By contrast, around 3.9 billion people followed Athens 2004 and 3.6 billion tuned in to Sydney 2000.

Viewer numbers in China alone broke national records for sports events. More than 86% of the households in China watched the Olympic broadcasts on TV every day, according to AGB Nielsen Media Research. To cater to the demand, CCTV had to dedicate two extra channels to covering the Games on August 12, bringing the total number of Olympic channels to eight.

The Beijing 2008 Games has also been the first Olympics to offer worldwide digital media coverage, via live broadband webcasts, video on-demand and mobile phone TV. In contrast, only eight countries experimented with delayed Internet coverage of the Athens games.

While TV has remained the main medium for accessing the Games, the new media platforms have proven popular in China. More than 1 million people watched more than 300,000 hours of Olympic programs on mobile TV by August 20, while more than 1 million visited online Olympic channels on August 18 (see stories under new media).

China handed the flame onto London, the host country for the 2012 Olympic Games, at the end of director Zhang Yimou’s spectacular closing ceremony. Can the world’s biggest sporting event keep getting bigger, brighter and more technically sophisticated than ever before? We look forward to watching events unfold in four years time.