Friday night's program, which included Marion Jones competing in the long jump and the US basketball team's two-point semifinal victory over Lithuania, pulled in a 10.6 rating and 20 share measured from 7.30pm to midnight. Each rating point represents a little more than 1 million television households.
Share is the percentage of in-use TVs tuned to a given program.
The rating was 35 percent lower than what advertisers were told to expect. NBC has increased the number of national commercials it runs by an average of two per hour to satisfy advertisers expecting to reach larger audiences during the 17 days in Sydney. With two nights left to measure, the cumulative rating for the Olympics slipped to a new low of 14.2 with a 25 share. That's worse than for any Summer Olympics since the Tokyo Games in 1964, when NBC aired only 14 hours and averaged a 12.7 rating. NBC decided to show all action on tape because Sydney is 15 hours ahead of America's East Coast, and one factor hurting the ratings is the delay between when events are completed and when they are aired.