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Much like the world’s best cyclists on the streets of Rio, NBC is in all-out spin mode during the early part of the Olympics.

The network is making the case that focusing on past comparisons doesn’t fully show how viewers are consuming these Games.

NBC is responding to a flurry of headlines about sagging ratings in Rio. Through five nights, its primetime rating is down more than 20 percent from the comparable period during the 2012 Olympics in London.

If anything, NBC’s rating was supposed to be higher with much of the Rio coverage live in primetime; London was often on tape delay at that time period.

The network, though, says there is much more to the story.

The London Games aired only on NBC during primetime. That isn’t the case in Rio, where in addition to the prime-time package on NBC, there also is coverage on NBCSN and Bravo during the evening hours.

NBC contends the overall primetime rating should comprised of all those platforms. It even has come up with a new term: “Total audience delivery.”

Now that’s some serious spinning.

NBC says the total audience delivery (TAD) component has lifted primetime viewership by at least 7 percent each night. For instance, on Tuesday, NBC pulled in 33.4 million viewers for its primetime coverage featuring Michael Phelps, Katie Ledecky, and the U.S. women’s gymnastics team. Another 1.9 million viewers tuned into Olympics coverage on NBCSN and 414,000 viewers watched Serena Williams’ match on Bravo.

So from a TAD standpoint, there were 36.1 million viewers watching on Tuesday night, just a few ticks off the 38.7 million who watched on the comparable night in 2012.

But wait, there’s more.

Through Tuesday, NBC said viewers had lived streamed 883 million minutes of Olympics coverage. That exceeds the 818 million minutes of live streaming for the entire London Games.

On NBCOlympics.com and the NBC Sports app, more than 1.3 million unique users streamed the women’s gymnastics team victory Tuesday afternoon, ranking as NBC Olympics’ best-ever Summer Games stream.

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Those figures show the ever-growing emergence of digital in terms of viewer consumption of the Olympics. For all its spinning, NBC makes a good argument that ratings don’t tell the complete story here.

Finally, regardless of how a rating compares to London or previous Games, 36.1 million viewers is huge for a Tuesday night in August. Once again, many Americans are watching the Olympics.