NBCUniversal Wins Big With Olympic Rating Gains
By Movieguide® Contributor
NBCUniversal scored big with its coverage of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games.
“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,” The Hollywood Reporter said on Aug. 12. “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.”
Movieguide® reported Aug. 1:
“NBCUniversal’s presentation of the opening Sunday of Paris Olympics competition on NBC, Peacock, and across key NBCU platforms posted a Total Audience Delivery (TAD) of 41.5 million viewers, according to custom fast national data from Nielsen and Adobe Analytics – nearly doubling the opening Sunday of competition for the Tokyo Olympics (21.7 million across all platforms),” NBC reported.
It seems like NBC and Peacock made the right choice by being the sole network to cover the Olympics.
“Led by Peacock, 4.5 billion minutes of Paris Olympics coverage has been streamed through Sunday – surpassing the entire Tokyo Olympics (4.48 billion minutes across NBCUniversal digital platforms),” NBC wrote.
The Tokyo Games did have a “significant” time difference from Paris and had few live visitors due to the COVID restrictions.
Vulture observed that Peacock’s performance greatly improved since the platform’s 2021 and 2022 Games coverage. The Games set a record with 23.5 billion minutes of viewing time on Peacock and NBC’s other 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.”
NBCU had an average of 4.1 million streaming views each day of the Olympics. One of every five viewers visited the GOLD ZONE, which showed nearly all gold-winning moments at the games.
Spanish Language broadcasts on Telemundo grew by 26% from the Tokyo Games.
“These Olympics have captivated Americans in huge numbers across NBCUniversal platforms,” NBC Sports President Rick Cordella said. “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.”
NBCUniversal Media Group Chairman Mark Lazarus said, “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.”
In the final weekend of the games, the Men’s Basketball match between the U.S. and France had an average of 19.5 million viewers on NBC and Peacock. That’s twice the viewership that the same game between the same two countries had in Tokyo. And this year’s game was the most-watched gold-medal basketball game since 1996.
The LA Times said that NBC may have benefitted from the nation looking for a positive interruption among its divided sides.
It reported Aug 9, “NBC may have been fortunate that the Paris Olympics came along at a time when a deeply politically divided country could use a break.”
