Newswise — Dr. Andrew Billings at The University of Alabama and colleagues will be monitoring the 2018 Winter Olympics for several trends, including the use of mobile devices to watch and learn about the games as well as the gender gap in primetime coverage.
Billings is part of a grant from the International Olympic Committee to study mobile and second-screen media use for the 2018 Winter Olympic Games. The team is distributing and analyzing survey data from Canada, China, Germany, Japan, Sweden and the United States to determine the differences in the Olympic viewing habits from one country to the next.
“We can access the Olympics on our phones, laptops and iPads,” said Billings. “The big question we have is: ‘Is mobile making you more likely to watch the telecast in the evening, or is it replacing television viewing?’”
This research will show the impact of mobile and second screen use upon the viewership of the Olympics as a whole, and could help network producers schedule online content to maximize their audience’s interest.
Billings also co-authored the book “Olympic Television: Broadcasting the Biggest Show on Earth,” released in 2017, that found women athletes received a greater percentage of primetime broadcast television coverage during the 2014 Sochi Games than in any previous Winter Olympic broadcast.
NBC devoted 47.7 percent of its primetime Olympic coverage to women in 2014, compared to 52.3 percent to men, when mixed pair events are excluded. The 4.6 percent gender gap is the smallest for a Winter Olympiad recorded since the studies began. It is also significantly smaller than in any of the previous four Winter Games.
The gender gap is typically wider in the Winter Games than the Summer Games. Women received 49.8 percent of the primetime broadcast network coverage over the past six Summer Olympiads (1996-2016), compared to 40.2 percent over the past five Winter Olympiads (1998-2014). There was actually a reverse gender gap during the 2012 and 2016 Games, with women receiving 54.8 and 53.7 percent of NBC’s Olympic primetime broadcast coverage respectively.
Billings and his co-authors will post regular updates about NBC’s coverage of men and women athletes throughout the 2018 Winter Games on the website FiveRingTV.com.
Billings is the director of the Alabama Program in Sports Communication and Ronald Reagan Chair of Broadcasting in the department of journalism and creative media. His research interests lie in the intersection of sport, mass media, consumption habits, and identity-laden content.
With 14 books and over 140 journal articles and book chapters, he is one of the most published sports media scholars in the world. He also serves on many editorial boards, including as an associate editor of the journal Communication & Sport.
He has been interviewed more than 500 times by media outlets ranging from The New York Times to The Los Angeles Times to ESPN. Billings has also consulted with many sports media agencies.
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