This London 2012 Olympiad has been touted by the International Olympic Committee as being the first fully digital Olympiad. While that may be true that people have the ability to watch the games like never before, it seems that not very many of them will actually be using their PCs or Mobile devices to do so.
The study comes from online sports broadcaster Perform Group’s Global Sports Media Consumption Report, which says that most people will be taking in the Olympics on good old fashioned television.
And not by small margins, either. The study shows that 71% will watch the Olympics on television and a meager 16% will watch them online. In England and the rest of Europe, the story is the same — 9% in England and Germany, 11% in France.
The only country that breaks free in this category is China, boasting 70% of people watching online. China dominates every category, however, the games being much more popular amongst the Chinese. Couple this with the method in which the survey was conducted. The research groups in every country but China concentrated on a representative sample from all adults. In China, the survey was taken amongst “tech-savvy” consumers. This sample is already considered to embrace different types of media.
The International Olympic Committee will stream the entirety of the Olympics online via YouTube, but television networks across the globe are all doing the same. NBC will catch a good portion of the coverage they miss on their primary station with coverage on the NBC Sports Network. They will also cover 67.5 hours of trials and qualifiers before the games begin. Some of you may have already caught some of this over the past weekend. In the U.K., BBC Sport will be streaming the Olympics in their entirety across all platforms.
Most events are scheduled around The Untied States and Europe’s office hours, when fans are likely to watch at their desk. Even with this convenience it seems that most are content to watch what coverage the can in the evenings, on television.
