Saturday's show, which included four track relay finals and live coverage of the men's basketball final, drew a 10.5 rating and 20 share.
That is a 10th of a point lower than Friday's rating and it dropped the cumulative Nielsen number to 14 (each rating point represents a little more than 1 million television households; share is the percentage of in-use TVs tuned to a program).
These are the lowest-rated Summer Olympics since 1964, when only 14 hours of the Tokyo Games were televised.
The ratings are 35 percent lower than for the 1996 Atlanta Games, and 21 percent lower than for the 1988 Seoul Games -- the last time the Summer Olympics were this late in the year.
NBC Sports had predicted the ratings would be between 17.5 and 18.5, and told advertisers to expect no worse than a 16.1. Because the ratings have been under that guarantee, NBC started airing extra commercials for sponsors during the first week of the games.
Saturday's show peaked with a 12.8 rating from 9:30 to 10 p.m., which featured Marion Jones winning her third gold medal as part of the U.S. 1,600-meter relay.
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