In the second week of the Beijing Olympic Games, an update on the broadcast was givem by the IOC.

Although final numbers were not given, the Beijing Olympics looks to be the biggest broadcast event in the Olympic history.

There is an unprecedented amount of Olympic sports content available around 5000 hours of coverage available in around 200 countries and territories around the world. The combined total output of Olympic coverage will be around 3 times for that of the Athens Games.

Moving to the Opening Ceremony, that was the highest sports related broadcast rated events in the history of Chinese television. With a staggering 842 million people in China who tuned in to watch the Opening Ceremony. In general the opening ceremony surpassed the one of Sydney Athens and this in the major markets from various parts of the world. Although no definitive global statistics are available yet, indications suggested that the figure for the total viewing in the world could be around 1.2 billion people.

In the US this weekend, NBC also registered the largest audience on Saturday night for 18 years so since 1990 as over 40 million viewers tuned in to watch Michael Phelps when he won his record of 8 gold medals. In China, over 1 billion people have already watched some Olympic sports coverage.