Pyeongchang wins 2018 Winter Olympics

Image Credit: Lee Jin-man/AP Images

The South Korean city of Pyeongchang was awarded the 2018 Winter Games, receiving 63 of 95 votes from the International Olympic Committee. Seoul hosted the 1988 Summer Games, but Pyeongchang, which had narrowly lost the race to host the 2010 and 2014 Games, now becomes the first non-Japanese Asian city to host the Winter Games.

South Korea’s victory has some implications for American audiences and NBC, which recently paid $4.4 billion to air the next four Olympics. Pyeongchang is 14 hours ahead of the U.S. Eastern Time Zone, meaning that NBC will be forced to air tape-delayed competition hours after the results are known. This isn’t unprecedented, of course; the 2008 Summer Games were in Beijing, which is 12 hours ahead of New York. Then, NBC streamed more than 2,000 hours of live coverage online while culling tapes of the most popular events for its primetime audience. About 30 million viewers still tuned in each night for those telecasts, even though many of them already knew the results.

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