2004 Olympics: Barry Horn

12:05 AM CDT on Monday, August 30, 2004

By BARRY HORN / The Dallas Morning News

Good news if you liked NBC's presentation of the Athens Olympics. The network's format planned for at least the upcoming three Olympics will be similar – lots of live events on cable augmenting a tightly produced highlights show in prime time.

One major tweak: Beginning with the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italy, NBC's coverage will come in wall-to-wall high definition. It won't be delayed by 24 hours with second-tier broadcasters as it was from Athens. Bob Costas will be coming into living rooms across America really up close and personal.

One minor: By the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, NBC hopes to introduce foreign-language audio on demand. Want to hear the call of the 100-meter dash in Chinese? No problem. Dressage in French might sound more appealing. At last, you will be able to hear "Marbury's jump shot from 15 feet misses and is rebounded by Nowitzki" in Japanese.

"I'd be shocked if we had any quantum leaps like we've had from here in Athens," NBC Olympics boss Dick Ebersol said in a phone interview.

Ebersol was referring to the roll out of endless cable network event coverage on MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo and USA in addition to over-the-air Spanish-language offerings on Telemundo.

In addition, NBC overhauled its prime-time presentation by paring down its feature offerings from 125 in Sydney to 40 in Athens. Event coverage was beefed up at the expense of pre-produced packages designed to breathe life into otherwise faceless competitors. That chore was left to the play-by-play announcers and analysts.

Bottom line: NBC offered 25 percent more action.

NBC is in no hurry to make dramatic changes because Athens proved to be a dramatic financial and ratings success. By the time the bean counters are finished calculating the pluses and minuses, the network is expected to declare an Olympic profit in the tony neighborhood of $60 million to $70 million.

For that NBC can thank America's swimmers and gymnasts. Take a bow, Michael Phelps. And especially you, too, Carly Patterson of Allen.

A little controversy like the scoring flap that plagued Paul Hamm might try a man's soul, but it helps peak the interest of rubberneckers. The U.S. gymnasts and swimmers hit their strides and strokes running the very first night of competition.

"The early overall performance of the American teams, specifically gymnastics, was vitally important," Ebersol said. "The gymnastics teams were never competitive in Sydney."

The Sydney ratings four years ago were good enough to win prime time for NBC but didn't meet expectations. They didn't come close to what the network promised advertisers, forcing NBC into the uncomfortable position of offering "make-good" commercials. That translates into free advertising, a two-word phrase that is the bane of networks everywhere.

For Athens, NBC guaranteed prime-time advertisers an average rating of about 14.5. Through Friday night, the network was averaging 15.5, which translates into more than 1 million more homes every night than promised. Cha ching.

The number of average prime-time viewers was 24.9 million, an increase of 3.1 million viewers from 2000. Nielsen Media Research is reporting NBC attracted 200 million "unique" viewers. That's 75 percent of the U.S. population living in homes that have at least one TV. Nielsen describes a unique viewer as one who's seen at least six minutes of prime-time programming and is not counted again.

Ebersol is particularly proud of another Nielsen statistic reporting that 54 percent of cable viewers from 4 to 7 p.m. switched over to NBC's prime-time coverage. Before the start of the Olympics, NBC could count on getting 1 percent of the audience from its cable siblings.

It didn't hurt NBC that Athens was an August event. Sydney was a September spectacle, battling back to school throughout much of the country, interest in the NFL regular season and baseball's pennant races.

Beijing will be another August Olympics. NBC wouldn't have it any other way.

E-mail bhorn@dallasnews.com