NBC will turn Olympic profit

NBC Universal, owner of the third- ranked U.S. television network, sold about $900 million in advertising for its broadcast of the winter Olympics, and Chairman Bob Wright said the two-week event will make money.

"This is the biggest thing that we do," Wright said in an interview from NBC's offices in Torino, Italy, Thursday. "It's the showpiece of all of NBCU's television programming."

The network, a unit of General Electric Co., paid $613 million for the right to broadcast the two-week event, betting enough Americans would tune in to an event taking place six time zones away. Ice skater Sasha Cohen and skier Bode Miller are among the U.S. athletes vying for a first Olympic gold medal.

NBC may benefit from its decision to televise 418 hours of Olympics on six of its networks, including Telemundo, its Spanish language network. The move enables NBC to sell more advertisements and reach more narrowly focused viewers. For instance, an advertiser can target one commercial to a hockey audience and another for skiing.

"This is how they win," Wright said. Advertisers have "an opportunity to participate in all of those games and work with very different audiences. They end up with positions that maximize exposure."

NBC had a $70 million profit from the Games in Salt Lake City in 2002 and a similar take from the 2004 Summer Games in Athens. The company had $927 million in revenue from the Athens broadcasts after paying $793 million for the U.S. rights. The broadcaster paid $555 million for Salt Lake City.

Fairfield, Connecticut-based GE will also collect $50 million to $100 million from the sale of lights, trailers and generators to the games.

GE is benefiting from "all the backup generation, huge rental fleets of portable space they can sell," said Mark Demos, an analyst at Fifth Third Asset Management in Cincinnati, which owns about 13.1 million GE shares. GE is the world's biggest maker of power generation and medical equipment.

CBS Corp. paid $50,000 to broadcast the 1960 winter event in Squaw Valley, Calif., the first televised Olympics. The rights to the Summer Games that year sold for $394,000.

Since then, Walt Disney Co.'s ABC and NBC have dominated the Olympics, with ABC covering most of the 1960s and 1970s, including the Munich Games in 1972 when announcer Jim McKay reported on 11 Israeli athletes who were killed by terrorists. NBC has broadcast every event since 2000.