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Beijing Games coverage to top list

By Xie Chuanjiao (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-08-21 10:33

The Beijing Games will top all previous broadcasts of the event in terms of coverage and technology.

An official said some 4.5 billion people would have viewed the Games on TV and online.

For the first time, the Games are being broadcast in digital and high definition, Timo Lumme, managing director of the IOC Television and Marketing Services, said at a press conference yesterday.

At the Athens 2004 Games, only eight countries experimented with delayed Internet broadcasts, he said.

The NBC website has received 30 times more video views than it did in Athens, and 12 times more mobile phone downloads than it did for the Turin 2006 Winter Games, Lumme said. NBC is the IOC's US partner.

In China, 102 million people have watched live broadcasts of the Games online in the past 12 days, with another 146 million people watching video on demand.

Lumme said there is an unprecedented amount of Olympic sports content available, some 5,000 hours of coverage provided by 200 countries through rights holding broadcast partners.

"These partners are expected to make a combined total output of Olympic coverage which will be about three times that of the Athens Games," he said.

The opening ceremony of the Beijing Games had the highest broadcast rating in the history of Chinese television, Lumme said.

"About 842 million people in China tuned in to watch some coverage of the opening ceremony," he said.

"Although we won't have the complete definitive global statistics for sometime yet, indications suggest that the figure could be around 1.2 billion people."

In the United States, NBC registered the largest audience for a Saturday night in 18 years. More than 40 million viewers tuned in to watch Michael Phelps when he won his record eight gold medals.

In China, more than 96 percent of the people watched the Olympic Games from Aug 9 to 16, the monitoring agency AGB Nielsen said yesterday.

Urban Chinese people's viewing time also quadrupled to 750 minutes in the week, while rural people watched more than 990 minutes, 3.6 times the weekly viewing time before the Games.

To cater to this demand, CCTV has dedicated nine channels to covering the Games, Lumme said.

CCTV started installing 100,000 TV screens on 50,000 buses in 30 cities in December, Duan Xiaohu, an official with CCTV, said in an earlier interview.