Olympics Bring Huge Audiences to NBCUniversal Over Opening Weekend

The opening weekend of the 2024 Olympics has NBCUniversal saying “Vive la France.”

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Through the first three full days of the games, NBCU is averaging 34.5 million viewers across all of its linear networks and digital platforms for its primary telecasts. The ratings figures include both what it calls “Paris Prime” — 2-5 p.m. ET in the United States, when a host of medal events air live — and the U.S. primetime telecasts.

After drawing 28.6 million viewers for Friday’s opening ceremony, the weekend telecasts got even bigger: Saturday’s total audience was 32.4 million, and on Sunday — which featured the first day of competition for Simone Biles and the U.S. women’s gymnastics team — 41.5 million people tuned in, according to custom fast national ratings from Nielsen (for linear broadcasts) and Adobe Analytics (for streaming and digital).

The 34.5 million viewer average over the first three days is up 79 percent (from 19.3 million viewers) over the same period for the last Summer Olympics three years ago in Tokyo.

Comparisons to other recent Summer Olympics aren’t entirely like to like, as Nielsen didn’t include out of home viewing in daily ratings before 2020 and NBCUniversal didn’t have nearly as robust a streaming presence as it does now. Those caveats aside, however, the Paris games are stacking up well to 2016 (27.27 million viewer average over the first three days) and 2012 (35.13 million).

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Peacock and NBCU’s other digital platforms averaged 6 million viewers Sunday; Saturday and Sunday represented the second and third biggest days in Peacock’s history, behind only the day it streamed an NFL playoff game in January.

Through Sunday (and including some pre-opening ceremony competition), Peacock and NBCU’s digital platforms have amassed 4.5 billion minutes’ worth of streaming — surpassing the total from the entire Tokyo Olympics (4.48 billion minutes).

NBC Sports says the opening game for the U.S. men’s basketball team, a 110-84 win over Serbia, delivered 10.9 million viewers on NBC and Peacock — more than the gold medal game (9.3 million) from Tokyo. The U.S. women’s soccer team’s 4-1 defeat of Germany averaged 4.2 million viewers on USA Network and Peacock, topping every soccer match (men’s and women’s) from the past two summer games.

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