Tuesday's pairs figure skating has boosted CBS' Winter Olympics coverage to the second-best ratings of the games to date, but results continue to lag behind other recent Olympics and behind CBS' guarantees to advertisers.
The Eye's Tuesday primetime coverage earned an 18.2 rating, 30 share from 8 p.m. to 11:51 p.m., raising the games' average after five nights to a 16.7/27. (From 8-11 p.m., CBS scored an 18.9/29.)
CBS has guaranteed advertisers an average 19.6 rating, but it's now looking less likely that it will meet that figure, since the pairs finals were considered one of the stronger events on the schedule and they failed to achieve the level CBS is hoping to average.
Still, most of the top-draw events are yet to come.
Compared with the nights of pairs-finals coverage in 1994 and '92, the Tuesday primetime rating was down by 31% and 12%, respectively.
For the games as a whole, CBS is down 33% from '94 and 15% from '92.
The dropoffs are more pronounced in younger demos, as CBS fights an older skew to these Olympics. In adults 18-49, CBS is currently down 39% vs. 1994 and 30% vs. '92, and in adults 18-34, the Nagano games are lagging 46% behind '94 and 37% behind '92.
CBS' Tuesday adults 18-49 average (10.2/26) more than triples its seasonlong average for that night. CBS estimates 64 million viewers watched at least some of the Tuesday coverage.
ABC was solidly second for the night, despite lowest-ever firstrun ratings for "Home Improvement" (11.1/16) and "NYPD Blue" (9.8/16).
Tuesday also saw a continuation of WB's Tuesday hot streak, with "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (4.5/7) and "Dawson's Creek" (4.8/7) flowing to the third-best nightlong rating in WB history.
Each household rating point represents an estimated 980,000 homes, or 1% of the country's TV homes. Each adults 18-49 rating point reps 1.23 million viewers, 1% of the U.S. total. A share is the same sort of percentage, except it's measured against only the homes or viewers watching TV during the timeslot involved.
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