Paris 2024 Olympics Opening Sunday Coverage Scores 41.5 Million Viewers, Nearly Doubles Tokyo Audience

Paris 2024 may have just started, but it’s already proving to be a viewership win for NBC Universal. The opening Sunday of Paris Olympics competition brought in 41.5 million viewers, according to custom fast national data from Nielsen and Adobe Analytics. That’s nearly double the opening Sunday of competition for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

These viewers were seen across NBC, Peacock and key NBCU platforms. For comparison’s sake, in 2021, Tokyo saw 21.7 million viewers across all platforms.

That isn’t the only shocking viewership stat NBC had to offer. Already, streaming for the Paris Olympics has surpassing streaming for the entire Tokyo Olympics. Three days in and the event racked up 4.5 billion streaming minutes. (Tokyo saw 4.48 billion streaming minutes across all of  NBCUniversal’s digital platforms.)

Not only are these impressive numbers for the Olympics, they’re impressive for Peacock. Sunday became the streamer’s second-best day of engagement ever, behind only the “Peacock AFC Wild Card Exclusive,” which still ranks as the most live-streamed event in U.S. history.

Starting with last Friday’s Opening Ceremony, the three-day audience for Paris 2024 averaged 34.5 million viewers across the combined live Paris Prime, which takes place between 2-5 p.m. ET, and the U.S. primetime, which takes place between 8-11 p.m. ET. Accounting for these three days, that’s a 79% increase in viewership from Tokyo 2020. That COVID-impacted event saw 19.3 million viewers across its first three days.

A big reason for these big numbers had to do with the performance of the U.S. teams. The U.S. men’s basketball opener against Serbia — which ended in a win for the red, white and blue — averaged 10.9 million viewers on NBC and Peacock. For comparison’s sake, that’s a 15% larger audience than the U.S. team saw when they took home the Gold in men’s basketball during Tokyo 2020. Later on Sunday, the U.S. women’s soccer team’s win over Germany averaged 4.2 million viewers on USA Network and Peacock. That number is higher than the viewership for all men’s and women’s matches in the Tokyo and Rio Olympics.

Other highlights from the weekend included Simone Biles leading the U.S. to the top score in the women’s gymnastics qualifier, teammates Torri Huske and Gretchen Walsh winning the Gold and Silver for the 100-m butterfly and the U.S. women’s rugby team beating Brazil. Huske’s victory came a day after Walsh broke the Olympic record in the same event. It also marked the first time in 40 years that Team USA has won both Gold and Silver in the women’s 100-meter butterfly.

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