Olympics ratings fall for NBC as the pandemic and streaming scramble network plans

The message was hope, as it’s for each Olympics, however NBC additionally needed these Video games to mark the symbolic finish of the worldwide pandemic — a return to on a regular basis life and a celebration of the triumph of the human spirit after a troublesome 18 months. The gross sales pitch, from NBC’s perspective, made sense: the community is paying round about $12 billion to televise 10 Olympic Video games from 2014 via 2032. However the community’s narrative was additionally working headlong right into a state of emergency in Japan as a result of rising coronavirus circumstances and opposition to the Video games on the bottom there. When it was introduced that there can be no followers, the tv presentation abruptly grew to become more difficult, too.