• by Wayne Friedman , July 31, 2012

NBC has scored more Olympic records.

The third night of competition at the London Summer Olympics scored an average 31.6 million average viewers on the NBC Television Network -- the best viewer results in 36 years.

Only the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics did better -- at 37.7 million viewers. Monday's results were 1.4 million better than the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, and 4.5 million more than the 2004 Athens Olympics for the same night.

This brings the first four-day average of the London Olympics to 34.8 million viewers in prime time -- the most of any Summer Olympics in history. (The Summer Games were first televised in 1960.)

Looking at other dayparts, there were 9 million viewers watching NBC coverage in the afternoon; 6.4 million in late-night; and 7 million viewers watching Olympic morning coverage.

NBC says its still-new NBC Sports Network -- which has been airing varied Olympic programming -- recorded the best two-day viewership ever.  Sunday’s average viewership of 1.2 million (4 a.m. to 7:06 p.m. EST) was 10% above Saturday’s Olympic coverage, which came in at 1.1 million between the hours of 4 a.m. to 8 p.m. EST.

MSNBC improved 44% in viewership during the first weekend to 1.5 million viewers over the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, which had over 1 million viewers. CNBC took in 698,000 viewers on the first weekend -- 3:30 to 6:45 p.m. EST. This was a 24% improvement from the Beijing Olympics weekend afternoon average, which came in at 561,000.

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