The NBC Sports Network Hopes Ratings Will Rise

In past lives, it was called the Outdoor Life Channel, OLN and Versus. But by any name, the NBC Sports Network has been a blip in a universe dominated by ESPN.

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Robert Caplin for The New York Times

Mark Lazarus, chairman of the NBC Sports Group.

Sometimes consigned to the upper reaches of the cable listings, the network usually churns along with a low profile and modest viewership. During the London Olympic Games, however, it was temporarily transformed.

With about 14 hours of Olympic programming each day, primarily of team sports, the number of viewers swelled sixfold, to 977,000 a day, compared with the four weeks before the Games. That was an increase of 26 percent over the same period last year, providing a 17-day tonic to the ratings as special as the one CNN gets on election nights.

The idea was to enable viewers to see NBCSN as a viable sports channel, perhaps for the first time. In past Olympics, NBC Universal farmed out team sports to USA Network.

Among all cable networks, NBCSN leapt to fifth in viewership, and it was No. 1 with viewers 18 to 49 and 25 to 54. The most-watched event was the United States women’s gold medal-winning soccer match, which drew nearly 4.4 million viewers — more than the network has drawn for any event, including the Stanley Cup Final, in its 17-year existence under various owners.

“This has exceeded all our predictions,” Jon Miller, president of the NBC Sports Network, said last week from London. “There’s a great euphoria with the success these Olympics have generated.”

Now what? The Olympics are gone until the Winter Games from Sochi, Russia, in 2014. The network returns to reality, meaning a regular schedule that has experienced reduced prime-time viewership in 2012 compared with last year.

Part of that decrease is because of the overhaul the network began earlier this year, when its parent, the NBC Sports Group, renamed it and added new programming, like a monthly prime-time interview show with Bob Costas; a daily early evening show called NBC Sports Talk; and sports like Major League Soccer. They join existing content like the National Hockey League, motor racing, cycling, college football, boxing, horse racing, and hunting and fishing.

On Monday, the network added a weekday morning show, “The ‘Lights,” that disdains anchor banter for an unseen male voice narrating highlights on a 20-minute loop. The show begins at 7 a.m. Eastern and is repeated five times in succession until 9 a.m. Another show, called “Caught Looking,” was scheduled to start Wednesday night. A collaboration with Major League Baseball Productions, the show will take a behind-the-scenes look at a specific weekend series through the rest of the baseball season.

Last month, it added a monthly magazine series — similar to “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” on HBO and “E:60” on ESPN — in partnership with Sports Illustrated.

But most of the new additions are studio shows and not the live-action sports that NBC Sports Network so desperately needs. There remain enormous gaps in its schedule. There are no Major League Baseball, National Football League or National Basketball Association games. There is no college football from major conferences. There are no Nascar races, only those from the lower-rated IndyCar series.

And there are no defining personalities among the channel’s regular hosts and game announcers.

It is no surprise, then, that it charges cable, satellite and telephone companies an average monthly fee of 31 cents a subscriber compared with ESPN’s $5.13, according to SNL Kagan. Depending on the time of year, NBCSN’s prime-time viewership is about one-tenth to one-quarter of ESPN’s.

“We all know this is a five-year plan to make it a bigger sports network,” Mark Lazarus, chairman of the NBC Sports Group, said on Sunday. “No one here believes, ‘You did the Olympics, now we expect your ratings to go up 20 percent.’ I’m hoping we get more people to sample the network.”

Mr. Lazarus has consistently kept his public expectations low and declines to speak about directly challenging ESPN. He recognizes that Olympic success is not enough to push subscriber fees higher or to justify rewriting existing contracts with cable, satellite and affiliates. NBCSN needs a stronger slate of more prominent sports to attract consistent audiences, especially males, from season to season.

Comcast, which owns NBC Universal, spent $4.38 billion to acquire the four Olympics from 2014 to 2020, but it will have to look seriously at buying some or all of the sports whose rights will soon be up for bids — Major League Baseball, Nascar or the Big East conference, each of which would be carried on NBC’s broadcast and cable networks.

Mr. Lazarus would alter his channel’s economics drastically if he could acquire a slate of eight Thursday night games from the N.F.L. But the league, which carries one Thursday slate on its own NFL Network, has not decided to sell another.

“The idea is that if they can get these blockbuster events, they at least have the leverage to get higher carriage fees,” said Brad Adgate, senior vice president of research at Horizon Media.

Peter Liguori, the former chairman of Fox Entertainment who also ran the FX cable channel, said the Olympics got NBCSN on “people’s mental menus.” Now, he said, in addition to aggressively pursuing more sports rights, the channel “has to give an audience something to talk about and do certain things that ESPN doesn’t, either in production techniques or announcers.”

He said the network needed breakthrough programming to attract viewers, as “The Shield” did for FX and as HBO has done with “Hard Knocks,” which focuses on a single N.F.L. team in training camp.

“If you get one thing to really stand out,” he said, “you break down the barriers of habit.”