Comcast placed the biggest bet yet that sports programming will continue to be a magnet for TV viewing into the next generation.
In a jaw-dropping deal, the cable company’s NBCUniversal unit on Wednesday announced a $7.75 billion deal with the International Olympic Committee, for rights to air the Summer and Winter Games from 2022 to 2032.
NBCU already owns the rights to air the Olympic Games through 2020.
The six-Olympiad deal works out to an average of $1.26 billion per Olympics — or roughly 15 percent more than the $1.1 billion average NBCU is now paying.
“This is one of the most important days in the history of NBCUniversal,” the entertainment giant’s CEO Steve Burke said in a statement.
While TV viewing has fallen steadily over the past couple of decades, sports programming has managed to retain a hold on its mostly younger audience.
The cost of rights to the NFL, Major League Baseball, the NBA and college sports has risen sharply — bid up briskly by all four broadcast networks and cable giants like ESPN, Fox Sports 1, TBS, TNT and others.
NBCU, agressively pursuing Olympics rights, which it has held exclusively since 2000, convinced the IOC to ink the latest deal without competitive bidding.
From 2000, the average rights cost of the Games has risen from $700 million to $1.26 billion.
However, as rights have spread from TV to desktop to mobile streaming, NBCU’s ad revenue has also grown rapidly. For the 2014 Winter Games, NBCU rang up $1.1 billion in ad revenue, up 36 percent from the previous Winter Games.
As part of the $7.65 billion deal, NBCU agreed to a $100 million promotional outlay.
The deal on Wednesday stunned rival executives, who characterized the price paid by NBCU as “insane.”
“The IOC is taking the money now while the sailors are still drunk, and the model is still relatively stable, as opposed to waiting [until closer to the 2020 end of the current rights deal] when consumers may have more choice, and the world might be disaggregated,” said one TV sports source, who wondered what cord-cutting may do to the business by then.
Robert Tuchman, a sports marketing expert at Goviva, told The Post that the IOC has been concerned about trying to keep interest in the Games vibrant at a time when the Web has given consumers a global gateway to a host of alternative sports.
“When you can follow so many other sports, the special aspect of the Olympics diminishes,” Tuchman said. “There’s a definite need to have a partner like NBC to stay relevant. It’s a home run,” for the IOC.
While there aren’t many sports rights up for grabs over the next few years, one sports rights expert said the Olympics, unlike sports leagues, only provides two weeks of programming every two years.
While the 15 percent price hike in the latest deal may seem steep, if inflation averages just 2 percent a year over the length of the agreement, NBCU would be paying less at the end of the deal than they will be paying for the 2016 Summer Games in Rio.