Sport UK do expect a greater haul than Beijing though. The amount of money that has been invested in the team for the Olympics is collossal. The success of this team determines the amount of future investments. If they fail to succeed (which frankly they have done so far) then future Olympic teams will not get as much funding. As Clare Balding said on the BBC yesterday, it's not good enough anymore just to say "I really tried my best, it was always going to be tough." The legacy of British sportspeople is in the hands of the current crop.

1m users browsed video on the BBC Sport site, there were 3.3m videos viewed!

So online peak could be 0.5m?

We're only on Day Two.

Agreed. We are but each time a "medal hopeful" is shown competing, they end in failure. Mark Cavendish is even blaming the Aussies for preventing him from winning. As McEnroe said last night, he should have realised that the winners were heading off infront and done something about it. The Olympics is all about personal Olympic glory.

BBC Olympic 3 apparently had a peak of 1.2m yesterday - amazing figure, I didn't think the extra 24 channels would do so well.

http://twitter.com/#!/rogermosey/sta...69055147819008

Just wondering has a figure for the opening ceremony on the BBC News channel been revealed yet?

That was the cycling road race on BBC Olympics 3. Would like to see a total share for those channels.

Regarding the 26 million peak for viewing figures of the opening ceremony, what were the viewing figures like for the opening ceremonies of Beijing, Athens and Sydney?

I'd imagine some people did what I did and spend a while not really watching anything in particular but enjoying the first day novelty of switching around all the channels!

Beijing 2008 - 5.06m
Athens 2004 - 8.68m
Sydney 2000 - 4m
Atlanta 1996 - 1.1m
Barcelona 1992 - 11.3m

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19026694

Ratings are pretty poor by comparison when they cannot be shown live here - between 1pm and 1am....(1996 & 2000) It would be great (but unlikely) if Rio 2016 could be shown around 9pm-12am here, it will be a Friday night ceremony.

Rio is 4 hours behind UK, I would imagine NBC would show live on East Coast and Central Time, tape delaying West Coast - from 7pm EST - which would be 12 midnight here.

Really impressed the opening ceremony on NBC rated higher than Atlanta 1996.

I've been reading the upto the minute as it happened section, very helpful if you don't have time watch all the time.

Glad these channels are doing well, I stuck with them yesterday, and will do for the next two weeks, only turning to BBC1 at 7pm. These channels really are brilliant, they allow people to flick between different sports easily without the fuss of the red button loading etc.

Women's road race should do well, a lot more exciting than the men's and a real contender from Team GB.

Olympics did fine last night for BBC 1, Midsomer Murders held up better than expected.

CSI could have done worse as well.

I don't think anyone watching on the news channel with all the various on screen junk deserves to be counted.

Surely too they just opted in and out of it rather than showing the lot.

That's not really how road cycling works. McEnroe said himself last night that he doesn't have a clue about cycling - I would be cautious of quoting his expertise!

Fantastic ratings all round. I am not unduly concerned over the lack of British medals so far. It's only day two! The opening weekend never promised a big haul for GB, so the only way is up I reckon.

This is correct, like Bradley Wiggins commenting on Ladies' Tennis, the GBR cyclist Lizzie Armitstead is doing well here.

Incredible. Its a shame these aren't getting promoted by the BBC, still insisting on promoting the 'red button'. Not sure if platform neutrality is the issue, but I'll bet a fair few people don't know these exist.

The Olympics did well; I expected the audience to dissipate over all of the available channels. I wonder if ITV1 will, be tempted to 'ITV3' their schedules next summer and just throw old dramas at the Saturday night schedule? Both The Million Pound Drop and Big Brother recovered reasonably well after the struggles of Friday night.

Does anybody have the figures for the following shows excluding +1 please?

Jon Richardson: A Little Bit OCD - 24/07/12 - 22.00 - Channel 4
Britian's Olympic Torch Story - 25/07/12 -19.30 - BBC One
World's Maddest Job Interview - 25/07/12 - 22.00 - Channel 4

Thanks.

There's not really much point in doing new idents for the Olympics though because it's more or less continuous coverage, they'd be shown far less frequently than the usual idents on a normal week so it'd be a waste of money.


It should be a good rating for the closing ceremony, anyway, well over ten million, because it'll be finished a little bit earlier than the opening ceremony and a Sunday people won't be going out so much. I loved the comment before the event that ratings would be affected by people being in the garden. What have they got in there, a triffid? You can do that any day. You may as well have argued ratings would be at least 250k down for all those whose birthday it was.


A rare victory for the ITV News there. Angelos just avoided the zero rating I was predicting, but this is just an illustration of C4's atrocious scheduling, it's all very well citing something like this as an example of their commitment to new comedy (although of course it's a spin-off of a BBC series) but if they put it in slots like this it's of no value whatsoever. Any channel with half a brain would have given it a better slot. I know it's its regular slot but they knew when they put it on Fridays at this time of year it would be on that night.


I thought Myleene's "check the TV listings for details of when the lottery draws are on during the Olympics" last night was pretty stupid, it would take no longer to say "Wednesday's draw is on BBC2 at half eleven". Especially as most weeks they pointlessly rattle through all the presenters for the next seven days. Actually the lottery presentation is terrible,the scripts are so badly written they never fail to confuse the viewers. I shouldn't watch it.


Yes, and I saw both these trailers quite a lot yesterday and you would hope there are some more programmes they can trail because it would get a bit irritating seeing the same couple (the 'stEnders and Merlin ones as well) for the entire three weeks. That must be the greatest promotion Total Wipeout's ever had, when it's of no value of course having been axed. Rather stupid as well to trail 'stEnders as "coming soon on BBC1" when that could be taken by viewers to mean there won't be any more episodes until it returns to BBC1. They should be doing more trailers to remind people it's on BBC2 (as well as my usual bugbear of trailing specific episodes of 'stEnders rather than just telling them to watch it generally).


That's true, and Christmas 1986 was pretty miserable weather-wise as well so it's not hard to imagine a load of people sat inside at a loose end. It's hard to imagine now how big Sunday afternoons were in those days, hence why that 1985 snooker final (which of course still holds the record for BBC2's highest ever rating) isn't mentioned in Television's Greatest Hits as another snooker match that year had a higher average - at 3pm on Sunday afternoon ITV.


Yes, I was going to mention that, all the BBC3 presentation is being shown. That to my mind is a better way of doing it than they usually do on BBC HD when they present it like it's a proper channel with now and nexts and everything when as a simulcast of three channels you constantly jump between BBC3 and BBC4 programmes and nobody in the world would watch both, yet the announcements are things like "In half an hour, A History of Christianity, but first Snog Marry Avoid".


To be fair, he did laugh immediately after he said it, clearly he meant to say something else but it came out wrong. I thought Lineker was quite good on the opening ceremony, as it happens, he said some intelligent stuff, and he's proven pretty assured on the coverage so far.


I think the fact it was the quietest night of the fortnight was offset by the fact BBC2 was probably the least mainstream it'll be during the fortnight, and ITV was at its weakest. For the rest of the week ITV have a slightly more robust line-up and BBC2 has more familiar fare, but the Olympic ratings will hold up as the events get bigger.


It's ludicrous, the stupidest idea imaginable as people interested in the Olympics wouldn't be watching The Million Pound Drop and people who were watching The Million Pound Drop were doing so because they weren't interested in the Olympics. You hear so much rubbish from C4 about how innovative they are and they have the most mundane, inflexible scheduling of any channel.

I found this on Broadcast (I needed to cache), http://webcache.googleusercontent.co...&hl=en&ct=clnk



Silver for Lizzie!!! She is naturally very emotional

Thanks. I'll update the game tomorrow with the rating.

The BBC's priority over the next fortnight is the Olympics. They've only put Eastenders on to shut up the "why does sport always have to disrupt our 10,000 annual episdes of soap" moaners and they won't be particularly bothered how low EE's ratings go whilst it's on BBC2.