NBC Sports has revealed its programming plans a year out from the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics in Italy. They’ll largely follow the blueprint that worked very well for them at last summer’s Paris Games, showing everything live on Peacock and providing a huge amount of coverage on cable platforms and broadcast NBC.
In fact, they’re set to set a Winter Olympic record for the number of hours of coverage on the NBC broadcast network.
Milan Cortina 2026 will have more programming hours on the NBC broadcast network than any previous Winter Olympics. NBC will provide Olympic fans with at least five hours of daytime coverage every day featuring the most exciting events, including live coverage of figure skating, freestyle skiing, snowboarding, speed skating, and more. With Italy six hours ahead of the United States’ Eastern Time Zone – which is identical to Paris — daytime coverage will feature the most popular events live on NBC on weekend mornings and every afternoon.
Given the time difference and following live coverage throughout the day, NBC will deliver Primetime in Milan, an enhanced Olympics primetime show providing three hours of exhilarating entertainment each night with the same style and substance that made Primetime in Paris so successful. The program will take the American audience inside the Olympic day from Italy, filled with the day’s great competitions, moments, stories, raw emotion, winter scenery, and the culture of the host nation for the primetime audience to share.
This fits into a notable larger trend of broadcast TV is importance for sports today. With continued cord-cutting of linear cable channels and not everyone adopting over-the-top streaming platforms (or not adopting all of them), the gap between broadcast TV’s reach and that of anything else keeps widening. Networks are leaning into that, especially for their biggest events.
It’s particularly notable that NBC Sports plans to carry live broadcast coverage each afternoon during the week, something that would have been well out of the question even a decade ago. They also continue with their recent policy (since the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics) of making absolutely everything available live on Peacock, a big shift from the old tape-delayed strategy often seen last decade.
Speaking of Peacock, they’ll return the hit Gold Zone whiparound coverage. NBC Sports has shown Gold Zone in some fashion since 2012, but it really went to a new level of prominence last summer with its shift to Peacock. That streaming service will also bring back the popular multiview feature from Paris.
But Peacock and broadcast NBC aren’t alone: linear cable channels USA and CNBC will also be involved. USA will be “the home of Team USA,” and CNBC will provide weekend coverage and weekday coverage after its business-day programming.
The Milan Cortina Olympics seems to be well-positioned for NBC from a ratings perspective. Italy is six hours ahead of Eastern Time, a combination that worked quite well for the Paris Games. Plenty of promising U.S. talents are likely to be involved, not to mention features on the local landscape, food, and culture.
NBC Sports president Rick Cordella talked all those elements up in a release:
“Paris proved that the Olympics are back and remain an unrivaled media property, with the unique ability to captivate the nation and generate huge audiences across all demographics for 17 days and nights,” said Rick Cordella, President, NBC Sports. “We expect Milan Cortina to carry on that legacy. The time zone allows us to mimic our Paris programming and coverage strategy on NBC and Peacock, which was widely praised and highly consumed. Team USA is poised to have one of its strongest Winter Olympic teams in years, and America has always been fascinated with Italy, its culture, food, and scenery. Milan Cortina has all the ingredients to produce yet another unforgettable Olympics one year from now.”
We’ll see just how memorable it winds up being and what kinds of ratings it winds up pulling for NBC. But this time zone and strategy certainly paid off for them in Paris, and it seems to bode well for an encore.
