NBC has announced that the Winter Olympics are a rating success for the network despite recent reports that the Olympics had not been receiving strong ratings.

NBC had it most dominate record last week, which included four times the average viewers of its closet network competitor, Variety reported.

Since Sunday, 10 nights of NBC's Winter Olympics prime-time coverage averaged 23.2 million viewers for the Peacock network, USA Today reported.

These numbers are proving that live sports such as the Olympics an even more popular draw relative to everything else in primetime.

Even though the 2010 Vancouver games averaged more viewers than the current Winter Olympics, these current games have seen an increase in viewers from the games in Torino in 2006 which only averaged 20.4 million viewers.

Out of the top twenty shows on television this week, the Olympics took the top seven spots, also rounding out the top ten was AMC's The Walking Dead which beat the Olympics the past two Sunday nights with their original episodes.

image: NBC