NBC and its coverage of the summer Olympics have had a bad few days on social media.

Since the Games began on Friday, the network has been bashed, slammed and thoroughly eviscerated on Twitter and elsewhere for a string of perceived sins: failing to carry the opening ceremonies live, even online; its continuing tape delay of major events, notably the Michael Phelps-Ryan Lochte duel on Saturday; and the presence of Ryan Seacrest, who has become the poster child for NBC’s failures. Throughout the weekend, two of the hottest hash tags on Twitter were #nbcfails and #ryanseacrestucangonow.

The bottom line, though, is that NBC executives couldn’t care less — and with good reason.

Despite the fact that many Americans knew the outcome of key competitions via online and social media, NBC scored record ratings for its prime-time coverage of the Olympics Friday through Sunday.

Viewership for Friday’s opening ceremonies drew more than 40 million viewers, breaking the record set by the ceremonies in Atlanta 16 years ago. Ratings for the Saturday and Sunday telecasts were the highest ever for the first two days of competition at an Olympics held outside the United States.

Overall, NBC is averaging 35.8 million viewers in prime time, up from the 30.6 million during the first three days of Beijing telecasts, which actually included at least some live coverage. The regions with the big viewership? That would be the Pacific and Mountain time zones, where the tape delays were tape delayed an additional three and two hours, respectively.

And its online coverage on NBC Olympics Live Extra was also pulling big numbers despite feeds that varied widely in video quality. On Saturday, there were 7 million live streams; total video streams, including replays and highlights, hit more than 13 million.

Yet it was the complaints — some of them truly vitriolic — that attracted the attention. NBC even threw fuel on the fire: first when Vivian Schiller, the network’s new chief digital officer, retweeted a message saying “the medal for most Olympic whining goes to everyone complaining about … tape delay” and then when it had Twitter suspend the account of a Los Angeles-based British journalist who had unleashed a wave of scathing tweets.

While there was considerable traffic on Seacrest and other aspects of the coverage, the bulk of the complaints focused on the tape delays — which has been a pet peeve of hard-core sports fans for years. What is new is that social media now allows viewers to vent in real time and in numbers that were impossible during the Beijing Games four years ago. That sure cranked up the volume.

But the complaints were coming from sports fans who expect real-time games — and that’s not necessarily who is watching the Games.

According to NBC research following the 2008 summer Olympics, about 210 million Americans watched at least six minutes of coverage. Of that number, 69 million did not watch an NFL game that fall, 108 million didn’t watch any Major League Baseball and 96 million never watched ESPN.

In other words, a large chunk of the Olympics audience isn’t hard-core. The tape delay-live debate means nothing to most of them, and they keep tuning in for the pageantry, the patriotic fervor and the quirkiness of such sports as archery, synchronized diving and women’s field hockey.

The bottom line is that NBC spent $1.3 billion for the rights to the Games and will spend millions more on production. At least during the first three days, the TV tape delay thing is working for the them in terms of ratings, and all the social media traffic in the world isn’t going to change that strategy.