Maybe my pessimism about the ratings for Olympics was premature.

According to The Wall Street Journal, "More viewers tuned in to watch the first two prime-time Olympics telecasts on General Electric Co. (NYSE: GE)'s NBC network than any summer Games in a decade -- even as the Games received record attention on the Internet."

My wife has offered a plausible theory about this performance: people are curious about China and are watching the Olympics because they can not afford other forms of entertainment because of high gas prices. I'm willing to give swimmer Michael Phelps his due as well. Plus, the only other sport competing for the viewer's attention is baseball. Pro football training camps are in full swing as well. The Olympics would be crushed if they occurred during football season or during "American Idol." Americans do have their priorities.

Friday's opening night ceremony attracted 34,2 million viewers, up 35% from the last summer games, according to the paper. I feel bad I missed it because it seems to have been very cool.

Keep in mind that General Electric still may face a tough slog in recouping its $894 million investment in the U.S. broadcast rights. Make goods, free commercial time, are still a possibility if the ratings go south.

The company's Olympic dreams, though, will do little to help the company's suffering shareholders which raises the question of why GE still owns NBC Universal.

Maybe a good Olympics will encourage Chief Executive Jeff Immelt to sell or spin-off the media business which is totally unrelated to the rest of the conglomerate.

Could there be a better example of hockey's irrelevance to General Electric Co.'s (NYSE: GE) than what happened last Saturday afternoon when the network quit showing Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Finals between the Ottawa Senators and Buffalo Sabres just as it headed into overtime?

Faced with the dilemma of covering a game which could theoretically go last hours more, NBC went to the Preakness Stakes 20 minutes early (at 4:40 pm) while hockey was switched to Versus, the league's cable outlet which is a available in about half as many homes as NBC.

And Versus had trouble with the transfer, so viewers had no idea what was up until the game finally reappeared. NBC would have better served running recaps of the dreadful 2006 Winter Olympics from Turin, Italy (the lowest rated in Winter Olympics history) or maybe infomericals for the 2008 Summer Olympics leading up the Preakness. At least those could have perfect time constraints so as not to affect coverage of the horse race.

Hockey fans got screwed because NBC focused on the Preakness, which for sure makes it more money and gets better ratings. The network's deal with the NHL is a revenue-sharing arrangement for which NBC gets zero dollars from the league is why.

But why inflict that arrogance, which begins and ends with NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol, on the handful of hockey viewers who bothered to watch?

By the way, the game ended midway through the first overtime with Ottawa winning to advance to the Stanley Cup Finals.

General Electric Co.'s (NYSE: GE) NBC is thanking its lucky stars that the New York Rangers are in the National Hockey League playoffs as the month of May dawns. Otherwise, its ratings would probably be as pathetic as national numbers usually garnered by rodeo, lacrosse or the network's Thanksgiving Day tape dog show.

NBC yesterday saw a 44 percent surge in large-market Nielsen ratings for the double-overtime New York Rangers-Buffalo Sabres playoff game, won by the Rangers 2-1. NBC drew viewers in 1.3 percent of homes in the 56 largest U.S. media markets, which encompasses about two-thirds of the 111.4 million U.S. households with televisions. The game lasted more than four hours, ending at 6:15 pm Eastern Time, thus entering near-prime hours in the East.

Last year's comparable telecast on NBC, a contest between Anaheim and Colorado drew 0.9 percent of the same potential audience. Just to show how critical the New York market is, NBC's national coverage of the San Jose-Detroit game on Saturday had a 1.0 large-market rating, down 9.1 percent from coverage of a New Jersey-Carolina game a year ago.

Clearly, it's a case of as far as the Rangers go in these Stanley Cup playoffs, so goes the NHL's national television ratings on NBC, which has a revenue-sharing agreement with the league. Unlike other sports, the network pays the league zero dollars for rights to broadcast its games. Nonetheless, it's amazing that the sport is broadcast on network television at all.

Unfortunately for NBC, the ratings bump may not last.

The Rangers trail Buffalo two games to one and face an uphill battle to make it to the finals. Another big market team, the Detroit Red Wings, is in the playoffs as well, but chances are remote that they will wind up facing one another.