NBC Has $1 Billion Schedule Hole With Olympics Postponed
- Move of games to 2021 seen leaving NBC ‘substantially whole’
- Most TV-rights payments not due to IOC until games happen
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No company pays more to associate itself with the Olympics than NBCUniversal. Now that the 2020 Tokyo Games have been postponed, the Comcast Corp. unit will need to figure out how the unprecedented change will affect one of its most valuable relationships.
First, the bad news: NBC is losing a massively popular event when other sports are also dark, and new shows aren’t being shot because of coronavirus concerns. The two-week Olympic Games provide thousands of hours of programming, and typically draw 25 million viewers to prime time each night. NBC called the last Summer Games, the 2016 Rio Olympics, the “most successful media event in history.”