NBCUniversal will always have Paris — the setting for a huge bounceback for its Summer Olympics efforts.
The company says the 2024 Olympics, which closed Sunday with a ceremony from Stade de France and a handoff to the next summer games in Los Angeles, averaged a combined 30.6 million viewers across all platforms for its “Paris Prime” daytime telecast (2-5 p.m. ET in the United States) and nightly primetime shows. That’s a huge improvement — 82 percent — on the last Summer Olympics three years ago in Tokyo, which averaged 16.9 million cross-platform viewers for daytime and prime telecasts.
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The Tokyo games were contested in largely empty venues due to COVID lockdowns, from a city with a much more significant time difference with the U.S. than Paris has. NBCU also significantly ramped up its streaming presence on Peacock and other digital platforms this year, resulting in widely praised live coverage of every sport and medal event.
The audience for the 2024 Olympics also compares favorably to those in both 2016 (26 million viewers) and 2012 (30.3 million), though streaming was a much, much smaller component of those games. They also aired in a time before Nielsen included out of home viewing in its daily numbers.
The Paris Olympics set a streaming record (dating back to 2008, when NBCU first offered live streams of Olympic events) with 23.5 billion minutes of viewing time on Peacock and the company’s other digital outlets. That’s 40 percent higher than the combined total of 16.8 billion minutes for all prior Olympics (summer and winter) in the streaming era. Were the Paris games considered a streaming series, they would likely rank among the top five titles of 2024 so far, based on Nielsen’s streaming metrics.
For the 17-day run of the games, NBCU had a daily average of 4.1 million streaming viewers, primarily on Peacock (the company also had two “Paris Extra” digital outlets). NBCU also says one of every five Olympics viewers spent time with Gold Zone, the hub that often showed multiple events at once and featured nearly every gold medal-winning moment.
Olympics viewing on Telemundo also grew, with its Spanish-language broadcasts improving by 26 percent vs. the Tokyo games.
“These Olympics have captivated Americans in huge numbers across NBCUniversal platforms,” NBC Sports president Rick Cordella said in a statement. “Led by our best-in-class engineering and production teams in Paris and Stamford, a staff of more than 3,000 worked tirelessly to present these reimagined Games in new and innovative ways in all dayparts and on all platforms. We are thrilled that Americans embraced and enjoyed the Paris Olympics as much as we have.”
Added NBCUniversal Media Group chairman Mark Lazarus, “We sold more advertising for the Paris Olympics than for any other Games, and we delivered for all of our partners. Parks and Studios received unmatched promotion, as the ‘halo effect’ boosted all of our businesses. The Paris Olympics was as exciting as we could have hoped, and we can’t wait to work with our partners at the IOC and USOPC in Milan-Cortina in ’26 and LA28.”
Over the final weekend, the men’s basketball gold medal game between the U.S. and France averaged 19.5 million viewers on NBC and Peacock — more than twice the viewers as for the final matchup (between the same two countries) in Tokyo and the most watched gold-medal hoops contest since 1996.
The Olympics halo also extended to NBC News, with both Today and NBC Nightly News beating their network competition over the run of the games (through Aug. 8). Today averaged 3.1 million viewers over that time, and Nightly grew to 7.64 million viewers — compared to 2.52 million and 5.73 million in the four weeks before the games began.
