It was always going to be difficult for Seven West Media to make a profit from the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Olympic Games are usually a loss-making event for a television network but to make matters worse, the Kerry Stokes-controlled network wrote down the games by $70 million back in 2017.

But viewers wouldn’t know that from the coverage it has produced in the past 14 days. Despite the financial challenges and a pandemic that has limited how many people it could send to Tokyo, Seven has done everything it can to make the most of an event it paid too much for.

The choice of sports to watch through its online streaming app 7Plus, a good timezone, prolonged lockdowns in NSW, Victoria and Queensland, and the performance of the Australian team has made it the most successful games - from an audience perspective - in Seven’s affiliation history with the International Olympic Committee.

“We forecast using different Olympic games, Commonwealth Games from the last 12 years to come to a number and it absolutely did surpass everything that we had experienced from the broadcast side,” Seven’s director of Olympics and chief revenue officer, Kurt Burnette, said.

“It’s actually quite a lot more difficult to forecast from a digital perspective. We forecast about a billion minutes and we’ll end up doing through four billion so. Even without the lockdown, we would have delivered record numbers. But it’s just been exponentially beyond that.”

Seven has a strong association with the Olympics that dates back to the 1990s, and periodically before that dating back to 1956. But this was the first Olympics that was broadcast via its linear TV channels and online video service 7Plus. The coverage included 45 dedicated Olympics channels across 7Plus, Channel 7 and its multi-channel, 7mate.

The most popular event on linear television in the capital cities was the men’s 800m final, where Australian Peter Bol tried his luck at an Olympic medal. More than 2.3 million Australians in metropolitan cities tuned in to watch the race. That was a little more than the 2.2 million that watched sprinter Rohan Browning in the men’s 100m semi-final.

But those figures don’t include 7Plus, and smart TVs means that a lot of people watch Seven through an app, rather than through a television signal. On July 25 - which included the women and men’s 4 x 100 freestyle relay final, the women’s 50m freestyle final - 363 million minutes were streamed on 7Plus. Among the popular events were equestrian, rock climbing and skateboarding - sports which typically don’t attract the viewers of track and swimming. The app increased its signed-in users by 43 per cent in the two weeks, from 6.4 million on July 20 to 9.18 million as of August 7 (Seven boss James Warburton previously said he expected users of 7Plus to increase from 6.3 million to 10 million by the Winter Olympics).

From the opening ceremony to August 7, Australians had watched more than 4.6 billion minutes on 7Plus, breaking all digital records. Seven also said the average full day Olympic broadcast audience has increased 77 per cent in the capital cities compared to 2016 Rio Olympic Games.