Television ratings for the Summer Olympics in Rio on NBC have not been good. They have been bad. They have fallen 17% from four years ago in London.

Before the Olympics began, Bloomberg points out, NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke said that his “nightmare” would be a 20% ratings drop. That has basically happened. And if you drill down to 18- to 49-year-olds, it did happen: ratings fell 25% among that key group.

But that’s not the point. The bigger story here is that digital viewership is up, up, up. In the first week of these Games, online users streamed 1.86 billion minutes of NBC’s coverage, handily beating streams for the Olympics in London and Sochi. Last Saturday, NBC boasted in a press release, was the best day ever for NBC Olympics on digital platforms, with 155 million live streaming minutes, up 263% from the comparable day at London in 2012.

In other words, while some surveys do suggest a drop in overall interest in the Olympics, and NBC has to deal with that, we are also seeing an inevitable rise in digital viewership that draws people away from their television sets. It is a rise that has been coming for years, that everyone anticipated, but it has now reached a point where networks can no longer ignore it.

“It’s amazing that people are at all surprised by the Olympic viewing numbers,” says Jim O’Neill, an analyst for digital video platform Ooyala. “TV has been in gradual decay across almost every demographic for the past decade, and still, Comcast/NBC (CMCSA) structured the Olympics broadcasting rights in the old way. Forcing the viewer to be a pay-TV subscriber, or a subscriber to a service like Sling TV to watch the games, even online, artificially limited their audience.”

Indeed, NBC reportedly spent $12 billion to get exclusive US broadcast rights to the Olympics through 2032. And rather than rethink its investment now, it ought to rethink the way it takes advantage of those rights. This year, it offered more content on digital platforms than ever before: viewers, if they wished, were able to watch every single event on something other than a television. But they still had to have a cable login, and therein lies the problem. By requiring cable login credentials, NBC didn’t do enough to pull in cord-cutters, or “cord-nevers” (those who never paid for cable in the first place).

Despite the ratings fall from 2012 to 2016, NBC is still beating all the other networks during the Olympics, which counts as something of a win. It has also seen a bump for channels like NBC Sports Network and Golf Channel during the past two weeks.