NBC's Olympics coverage enjoying a viewership surge, though there's a caveat (2024)

One of the major stories heading into the Paris Games from a media perspective was whether the Olympics could get the viewership groove back. Eyeballs dropped dramatically in recently years, with the COVID-moved Tokyo Olympics in 2021 averaging 15.6 million viewers per night in 2021 across NBC’s various television and digital platforms, a massive decline from the 27.5 million who watched the Rio Olympics nightly. The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics averaged 11.4 million across all platforms, the least-watched Olympics in the modern era and a sharp decline from the 19.8 million average for the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

We now have initial data from the Paris Games, and you could not fault NBC Universal executives for playing “La Marseillaise” on a loop in their offices. Here is what the opening days look like for the Paris Games:

That’s a five-day total audience delivery average of 34.0 million viewers across the combined live Paris prime time (2-5 p.m. ET) and U.S. prime time (8-11 p.m. ET) time periods.

Now for some important context: NBC is rolling up its viewership for the Paris Games to include live viewership from 2-5 p.m. ET featuring NBC, Peaco*ck, USA Network, CNBC, E!, Paris Extra 1, Paris Extra 2 and additional NBCU digital platforms, as well as U.S. prime-time viewership on NBC, Peaco*ck and USA Network. (Total Audience Delivery is based upon live-plus-same day custom fast national figures from Nielsen and digital data from Adobe Analytics.)

The network says the revised methodology is a more accurate way to present viewership information for Paris because viewers have never before had the option to watch a live fully produced Olympics on NBC or Peaco*ck in daytime in addition to the traditional prime time (which is a curated presentation given the competition day has ended in Paris, six hours ahead of Eastern time in the U.S.).

Per Sports Media Watch: NBC has combined viewership figures across multiple networks in the past, but not to this extent. It makes viewership comparisons with previous Olympics an apples-to-baguettes comparison (so one should be judicious with percentage increases). But NBC did announce they would do this prior to the Games and sold commercial time to advertisers off the revised methodology.

“Nominal viewership of Paris 2024 has been quite impressive and shows the importance of relative geography and where the Olympics are taking place time-zone wise relative to the United States,” said William Mao, a senior vice president of global media rights at Octagon, a sports and entertainment agency. “Having a full daytime schedule of live event windows in the U.S. has clearly bolstered TV numbers and doesn’t seem to have materially impacted prime-time viewership of the recorded/re-air programming, which was also largely the prime-time programming during Tokyo 2020. The growth reported has been helped by combining afternoon + primetime viewership for Paris and comparing it to a different … reference for Tokyo.”

Some breakout viewership highlights:

• The U.S. men’s basketball team drew 10.9 million viewers on NBC and Peaco*ck for its Sunday opener against Serbia. That topped the gold-medal game viewership from Tokyo (9.3 million), and per SBJ’s Austin Karp, the number would’ve topped Game 4 of the NBA Finals this year (9.6 million), the final round of the Masters (9.6 million) and this year’s Golden Globes (9.5 million).

• The U.S. women’s soccer team averaged 4.2 million viewers on USA Network and Peaco*ck for its group-stage win over Germany.

• The U.S. women’s basketball team’s opening-game win over Japan on Monday averaged 3.0 million viewers on USA Network and Peaco*ck, beating all men’s and women’s basketball at the Tokyo Olympics, excluding the gold-medal games.

• Sunday’s coverage was streamed by 6.0 million viewers on Peaco*ck and NBCU digital platforms. For context: The Bills-Chargers NFL regular-season game on Peaco*ck drew 7.33 million viewers. That number also included over-the-air viewership on the NBC affiliates in Buffalo and Los Angeles.

• Tuesday’s live afternoon coverage of the women’s gymnastics team final (12:15-2:30 p.m. ET) averaged 12.7 million viewers across NBC and Peaco*ck.

(Top photo of Simone Biles: Catherine Steenkeste / Getty Images)

Richard Deitsch is a media reporter for The Athletic. He previously worked for 20 years for Sports Illustrated, where he covered seven Olympic Games, multiple NCAA championships and U.S. Open tennis. Richard also hosts a weekly sports media podcast. Follow Richard on Twitter @richarddeitsch