Television viewing in the U.S. spiked by 17% during the Atlanta Summer Olympic Games in 1996, while TV viewing in Australia during the 2000 Sydney Summer Games jumped by 39%, according to a recent Nielsen report analyzing media trends from past Olympics.
Nielsen’s report also found that advertising spending in Olympic host countries grew significantly in both the U.S. and Greece in the years following the 1996 and 2004 Olympics. 
Only Australia saw declines in ad spending following the 2000 summer Games.  Those decreases can be attributed to general cutbacks in spending in the …

The New York Times reported Monday that NBC Universal may earn more than $1 billion in TV and online advertising sales for the Beijing Olympics.
The story noted that the largest TV advertisers have not changed in recent Olympics.  Six companies, including official sponsors like Coca-Cola and Visa, were among the top 10 spenders in both 2000 and 2004, according to data from Nielsen Monitor-Plus.
View the top 20 TV advertisers and advertising categories for the 2000 and 2004 Olympics.

Germany-based sports apparel brand Adidas AG is set to open its largest international store in Beijing, China.  The shop is about one-and-a-half times the size of Adidas’s previous largest outlet, on Paris’s Champs-Elysées, reports The Wall Street Journal.  Christophe Bezu, who heads Adidas Asia, told The Journal that China will overtake Japan as the company’s second-largest market, after the U.S., by the end of 2008.
In the same story, Richard Basil-Jones, Nielsen’s managing director of Asia Pacific media, noted a recent Nielsen survey, which suggests that Adidas faces significant challenges from both Nike and Li …

It’s that time of year at the All England Lawn Tennis Club.  Love — or rather, 40-love, game, set, match — is in the air.
But are U.S. TV viewers enamored of Wimbledon broadcasts?
Since 2001, Wimbledon telecasts have drawn average audiences of 2 to 2.5 million viewers.  Last year’s fortnight of broadcasts drew an average of 2.29 million viewers per telecast — up slightly from 2006, when 2.06 million fans tuned in, on average.
While the 2000 Wimbledon broadcasts claimed the largest U.S. audiences in recent memory (4.07 million viewers per telecast), …

While primetime TV ratings continue to suffer, sports programming across the US has seen significant growth over the past few months.   Every major sporting event in the US over the past two months (The Kentucky Derby, The Belmont Stakes, The NBA Finals, The Stanley Cup Finals, The US Open Golf Championship) have enjoyed major successes. 
The highly-anticipated Summer Olympics in Beijing should continue the trend.  NBC will feature 1,400 hours of television coverage of the Summer Olympics with an additional 2,200 hours to be streamed online. 
The growth in sports programming comes on the …