Comcast and NBCUniversal are taking home their own Olympic gold.
The 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris drew a combined average of 30.6 million viewers across NBCU’s constellation of platforms, marking an 82% jump in viewership compared to the Tokyo Games and making the Games the most-streamed Olympics of all time.
The media giant on Monday shared that its coverage saw a whopping 23.5 billion minutes of stream time, a 40% increase compared to all prior summer and winter Games combined, while its total audience delivery in “Paris Prime” — afternoons in the US — and prime time drew in 4.1 million daily viewers on Peacock and NBCU Digital platforms.
The network’s Spanish-language broadcast on Telemundo also saw a 26% jump over the same period during the Tokyo Games three years ago.
“The Olympics reestablished its unique power to reassemble the American media audience,” said Gary Zenkel, the NBC Olympics president. “That shared experience extended over 17 consecutive days across NBC, Peacock, NBCU’s linear channels, and in short form on social and digital channels, as America rallied around the 594 Team USA athletes and their stories.”
Over the weekend, the men’s basketball gold medal game in which the US defeated France in a 98-87 thriller, averaged 20.3 million viewers on NBC and Peacock, making it the most-watched gold medal game since the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, the company said.
The streaming figures from Peacock, which launched in 2020, were seen as a victory for the Comcast-owned streaming platform, which has struggled against larger and more established competitors, such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. The Paris Games’ eclipsing of the Tokyo Olympics in viewership show how far Peacock has come in the four years since its launch, with a growing library of sports and entertainment content.
During the Games’ first week, Peacock streamed up to 60 simultaneous live events and up to 300 live events per day, the company said, culminating in more than 3,200 live events over the course of the Games, a major technological feat for the streamer.
NBCU credited its Parisian success to new tools unveiled ahead of the 2024 Games — including what it called Peacock Discovery Multiview, Live Actions, and its generative A.I.-powered “Daily Olympic Recap” using famed sportscaster Al Michael’s voice — that boosted viewership of its 5,000-plus hours of Olympic coverage.
Over one-quarter of viewers who consumed Olympics content on Peacock used the platform’s multiview feature, which allows viewers to watch multiple simultaneous events, it said, a feature not possible with traditional television broadcasts.
The huge increase in viewership comes after the Tokyo Games were marred by structural changes, having been pushed from 2020 to 2021 over health concerns born from the Covid-19 pandemic that eventually barred audiences from attending in person. The year-long delay and lack of a live audience likely contributed to record-low interest in the Tokyo Games, which averaged 15.6 million viewers in 2021 across NBC’s various television and digital platforms.
The last few years have also demonstrated the continued power of live sports to deliver large audiences as the traditional television model declines and media companies rapidly pivot their business to streaming. While streaming platforms have struggled to retain subscribers, live sporting events have consistently driven high viewership, resulting in a race to expand sports portfolios as platforms look to fend off regular subscriber churn.
NBCUniversal has spent heavily in 2024 attempting to woo subscribers, notably edging out Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent company, in its acquisition of future NBA broadcast rights. Though NBCU will pay significantly more to air the league’s games than under WBD’s previous deal, a boost in subscriptions following its Olympic presentation may inject the media behemoth with a welcome revenue bump.
“We sold more advertising for the Paris Olympics than for any other Games, and we delivered for all of our partners,” said Mark Lazarus, Chairman, NBCUniversal Media Group. “Parks and Studios received unmatched promotion, as the ‘halo effect’ boosted all of our businesses.”
That “halo” included NBC, which saw a boost in viewership across its network news broadcasts. “NBC Nightly News” anchored by Lester Holt averaged 7.6 million viewers during the two-week period, and the “Today” show averaged 3.1 million viewers, the network said.
While NBCU has not revealed the number of new signups for its Peacock service as viewers turned to the platform in droves to stream the Olympics, the company had anticipated a surge in subscriptions.
Last month, Comcast reported the streamer had lost 500,000 subscribers in the second quarter, falling to 33 million total, well below Netflix’s 277 million subscribers and Disney’s 153.6 million.
Now, the challenge for NBCU will be to retain its likely Olympics-sized surge in subscribers.
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