“The Rio Olympics will be looked at as the last games where traditional TV was priorities over other channels. For future Olympics, social media and on demand video will become equal partners to live TV. This is especially true as viewing the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea will be impacted by a significant time difference in the UK, which will only hasten consumers’ move away from viewing the action on live TV, to social media and on demand video,” said Dror Ginzberg, CEO of online video specialists Wochit.
According to Nielsen, after just 10 days of the two-week long Olympics, streaming of the Rio Games had surpassed the two previous Olympics (London and Sochi).
All of this happened as the Rio 2016 Olympics ended up being a low for traditional TV viewers compared to the last few Olympics.
IOC president Thomas Bach said, “Today, most (broadcasters) have their own digital platforms and we see that they’re using these to bring the public to their traditional channels. Digital feeds traditional TV and vice versa.”
We still do not know the Olympic streaming numbers from services like Sling TV and PlayStation Vue. These services did not report their numbers from the Olympics.
It will be very interesting to see what the numbers for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics look like. It is possible that by 2020 streaming will be the most popular way to watch the Olympics.
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