- More than 41.5 million people watched the opening Sunday of competition of the 2024 Paris Olympics across all of NBC Universal’s channels (including NBC, Peacock and other platforms), nearly double the 21.7 million viewers of the 2021 games in Tokyo.
- Beginning with the opening ceremony on Friday, NBCUniversal has posted an average of 34.5 million daily total audience delivery across its live Paris Prime (2-5 p.m. ET) and U.S. Prime (8-11 p.m. ET) time periods, up 79% from Tokyo’s average of 19.3 million.
- In addition, viewers streamed 4.5 billion minutes of Olympics coverage – primarily on Peacock – in the first three days of coverage. That is more than the streamed minutes of the entire Tokyo Olympics (4.48 billion minutes, across all platforms).
Admittedly, NBCU’s strong Sunday competition numbers were aided by some significant star power. The day featured Simone Biles and the U.S. Women’s Gymnastics Team taking the top score in the qualifying round and first and second place finishes by swimmers Torri Huske and Gretchen Walsh in the 100m butterfly.
The day also featured the U.S. men’s basketball team’s first game – which brought in an average of 10.9 million viewers on NBC and Peacock (a larger audience than for the gold medal game in Tokyo) – and the U.S. women’s soccer team triumphing over Germany, which topped all of the men’s and women’s matches in the Toyko and Rio games.
NBCUniversal asserted that ratings success translated to higher advertising impact, with attention up 18%, message recall up 33%, and likelihood to search up 67% on linear television coverage compared with competitive broadcast and cable programming.
Those impacts are also being felt in key categories, such as automotive, where Paris Olympics advertisers are seeing 52% greater incremental brand search vs. competitive TV. Similarly, restaurant advertisers are seeing 50% higher intent to visit after seeing an ad and movie advertisers are seeing a 25% higher title recall and 37% higher intent to go see a film that is being advertised during the Paris Olympics, according to NBCUniversal.
