First Week of Paris Olympics Saw Fewer Peacock Signups Than Exclusive NFL Playoff Game

Peacock finally got a proper Summer Olympics , and it leveraged them to the best of its ability . Though the Paris games were a great subscriber-acquisition event for the NBCUniversal streaming service, they were no NFL playoff game.

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In a new data set shared with IndieWire, Antenna , a research company focused on the subscription economy, observed 2.8 million Peacock signups over the first week (July 25-31) of the 2024 Paris Olympics. The average daily signups of nearly 400,000 subs was a 5.6x increase over the prior eight weeks (May 30 – July 24). That’s great.

So is this: Peacock commanded a whopping 29 percent share of all premium-SVOD gross subscriber-adds in July. That is nearly double its 16 percent share over the prior 12 months, a period that includes an even-larger subscriber-acquisition event.

When reached by IndieWire, a Peacock spokesperson declined to comment on Antenna’s data. We will get an official update on Peacock subscribers when NBCU’s parent company Comcast reports its third-quarter earnings in October.

Here is the difference between the NFL and the Olympics, per Antenna, in visual form:

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In January 2024, Antenna observed 3 million signups to Peacock over the three-day period leading up to and including the streamer’s AFC Wild Card Weekend game, in which the Kansas City Chiefs began their run to (and through) Super Bowl LVIII with a nail-biter victory over the Miami Dolphins. The playoff game was exclusive to Peacock and marked the first time an NFL playoff game was only available on streaming (except in local markets). It irked many NFL fans, but quite a few of them ponied up to watch the game.

Importantly, plenty of the Peacock newcomers stuck around. The loyalty rate from that acquisition moment was just 7 percent lower than Peacock’s benchmark, per Antenna.

The Peacock playoff game was no anomaly: The NFL is generally the biggest draw in all of media. The 2024 Super Bowl, in which the Chiefs defeated the San Francisco 49ers in a dramatic overtime finish, aired on CBS and thus streamed on Paramount+. In time for the big game, 3.4 million people signed up to Paramount+. Super Bowl LVIII averaged a gigantic 123.4 million viewers across multiple platforms, primarily CBS and secondarily Paramount+.

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The Olympics, of course, are not a single-day event like an NFL game is; viewership and membership are spread across multiple weeks. The Paris games ended on August 11; we do not yet have Antenna data from August 1-11. Though the average daily-signup number may not rise, the 2.8 million new-subscriber tally certainly will.