NBC, CTV Ratings Soar Higher, Faster, Stronger as Eleventy Billion Watch Opening Ceremonies

NBC, like CTV, struck Olympic Gold with their coverage of Friday’s opening ceremonies of the Vancouver 2010 Games.
According to fast affiliate Nielsen data, NBC scored 34.45 million viewers for their entire prime time coverage from 8 to 11 p.m. The NBC window on the games drew a peak audience of 38.04 million at 9 p.m. as the opening ceremonies began live from Vancouver.
Those numbers smoked the U.S. competition Friday, with things like Surviving Survivor on CBS, a Spiderman movie on ABC and a House rerun scoring 3-4 million each on CBS, ABC and Fox.
The NBC overnight numbers come on the heels of a report from the CTV-Rogers broadcast consortium that the opening ceremonies drew the biggest audience in Canada ever or at least since the first People Meters came into effect nearly 20 years ago. The new math PPM data, or ratings ‘roids, continues to deliver results that test credibility in Canada. An overnight, estimated audience of 13.3 million has been counted so far across all the consortium platforms. According to a network release, an estimated 8,948,000 of those watched Friday’s opener just on CTV alone.
CTV-Rogers came up with a whole new way to spin these numbers just for these games. They call it CUME, which they say stands for Canadian Unique Multimedia Experience (which sounds better than Crass Unmitigated Marketing Exploitation). They claim it is “a calibrated summary of the most-trusted audience measurement systems for television, online, radio, and print.”
According to the new CTV-Rogers CUME spin, eleventy-billion people watched all or part or none of the Olympic opening ceremonies Friday. CTV’s ad sales department is standing by. Go Canada!