Badminton to top half of Olympic TV stats According to that article, badminton was the 11th most watched Olympic sport out of 28 sports. Looking at the graph, it seems like badminton had a 500% increase in viewership from Sydney to Athens. It seems NBC's efforts to show the more "obscure" sports helped out a great deal. Let's hope this increased interest in badminton will continue until 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
I do hope that badminton will be in the ranks of Tennis on day if not better than Tennis. I'm confident that they will catch up.
Badmintoncentral.com is a big part of the increase!! This is the place where badminton enthusiasts talk and exchange ideas... we are the world english-speaking badminton community! Small and growing!
Hopefully we have a better coverage in Finland from Peking - from Athens we only saw a few games . From track & field one could watch every darn event .
TV stats only gave a reflection of gain in badminton popularity. If they include dvd sale by people like Han , we would be in top quartile. If olympic had real time streaming (not just live scores), badminton can easily be in the top 10% viewership. In many part of the world, people like me wanna watch live olympic badminton BUT JUST CAN'T, from any reachable source.
^ same here in canada, cbc kept broadcasting almost all the track & field. but only managed to show 2 matches (women's singles finals, mixed finals) and they were at like 5am.
i would be good if CBC can show badminton matches in the next olympic. I think we have a 12 hr time difference here in Canada, so if the matches are 9:00 am in China, then we can watch it here live at nite. But again, badminton is not very popular in Canada (except the asian communities), so highly doubt that many matches will be telecasted.
