Months of Olympic hype are so far paying off for the Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium, led by CTV.

As expected, Friday’s opening ceremony in Vancouver broke television records, averaging a cumulative 13.3 million viewers as the 3.5-hour event aired live across 11 channels and online on CTV and RDS’ Olympic websites. Helped by BBM’s Personal People Meters, the broadcast is now the most-watched television event in Canadian history, far surpassing the Beijing and Turin openers on CBC. (All numbers 2+.)

The numbers are not surprising, given the mega audiences for recent big ticket sporting events such as the Super Bowl (six million on CTV) and the World Juniors (5.3 million on TSN).

CTV alone yielded nine million viewers for the opener, while sports specialties TSN and Rogers Sportsnet averaged 1.32 million and 868,000 viewers, respectively. RDS contributed an additional 906,000 viewers.

Over on NBC, a whopping 32.6 million Americans tuned in to the opening ceremony — the most for a non-U.S. Winter Olympics since 1994, according to the New York Times.

On Sunday, ratings soared for the freestyle skiing men’s moguls event as Quebec’s Alexandre Bilodeau won Canada’s first gold medal on home soil, to the tune of 6.3 million viewers on CTV, while V and RDS together netted an additional 1.3 million French-language viewers.

The weekend’s other top event was the ladies moguls competition on Saturday, which generated a combined 6.6 million viewers on CTV, V and Sportsnet as Alberta’s Jennifer Heil walked off with a silver medal — Canada’s first of the Games.

Meanwhile, Rogers Sportsnet netted its biggest audience in the channel’s history when 1.6 million viewers tuned in for pairs figure skating on Sunday night.

______________________________

Photo: Miguel Potenciano