Nearly 420,000 Quebec viewers watched, on average, the Beijing Games each evening on ICI Télé, one of the worst audiences of the last Olympic meetings. On the other hand, online viewing of sports performances has seen a remarkable leap.
About 6.2 million viewers watched the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics at one time or another on Radio-Canada, or nearly 83% of the French-speaking population of Quebec. This is a drop of 9 percentage points from the previous Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, the state-owned company revealed on Tuesday.
According to preliminary data, for the entire duration of the 2022 Games, ICI TÉLÉ’s market share is 17.9%, compared to 22.7% in 2018. This decline in popularity of the Olympic Games has also seen on several other channels. On CBC, the 2022 Olympics attracted 26.5 million unique listeners, compared to 27.8 million for the 2020 Games and 30.6 million for the 2018 Games.
The American network NBC has meanwhile reported its worst ratings in the history of the major international sporting event. Some 11.2 million Americans turned on their televisions on average each night to watch the competitions, a marked difference from the 19.8 million daily viewers at the 2018 Games.
The 1 p.m. time difference between Quebec and Beijing certainly did not help the live broadcast of the events. A spokesperson for Radio-Canada, Marie Tétreault, explains this drop in ratings by “the presentation of two Olympiads six months apart, the political context, the pandemic context, the absence of professional football players NHL announced at the last minute, the growing trend of live viewing on digital platforms,” among other difficulties.
Online progress
Contrary to television ratings, the viewing of online competitions has seen strong growth. The number of “video connections” jumped 17% on Radio-Canada’s digital platforms compared to the last Winter Olympics.
Live content was particularly viewed with a 44% increase in online traffic compared to Pyeongchang 2018.
CBC reported that these Olympics were the most watched in the history of their online platforms. Canadians watched nearly 468 million minutes of Olympic sports online this year, an 11% increase from 2018.
The American network NBC recorded a 78% increase in its audience on the Internet compared to the 2018 Games. This online viewing, however, only represents barely 5% of its total audience.
On Radio-Canada, in addition to the opening ceremony which attracted 787,000 viewers, the most watched television segment was the women’s acrobatic snowboarding event with 633,000 pairs of eyes glued to the screen.