NBC Sports has been busy sending out announcements seemingly every day touting huge viewership numbers for this year’s Sumer Olympics from Paris. It’s a far cry from years past when the Olympics have seen recent ratings falling thanks to declining interest, unfriendly timezones, and global pandemics.
But this year, all of that has changed. The Paris timezone has allowed NBC to go all-in showcasing events live throughout the daytime stateside. And there’s a different energy around these games after the Tokyo’s Olympics were delayed a year until 2021. But perhaps the biggest factor has been the ease and accessibility of every sport and every event airing on Peacock.
And already, the streaming platform has set record numbers that blow every Olympics before out of the water.
Via NBC Sports comes the statistics that this year’s Paris Olympics have already reached a total of 10 billion streaming minutes, surpassing the previous three Summer Olympics combined on digital platforms:
Led by Peacock, 10.6 billion minutes of Paris Olympics coverage have been streamed through Thursday – marking the first-ever Summer Games with 10 billion streaming minutes and surpassing all prior Summer Olympics combined (9.8 billion minutes for Tokyo, Rio, London and Beijing Olympics across NBCUniversal digital platforms).
It’s quite a development for the streaming platform that represents a true changing of the guard, not just for the Olympics but for sports viewership on the whole. In the very recent past, fans and pundits have resisted Peacock’s growing impact on the sports scene as it paywalled key events that were aired exclusively on the platform.
However, the Olympics are the perfect event for Peacock in providing one place for fans to find literally everything. The gold medal of their coverage would certainly be awarded to the Gold Zone whiparound shows, expertly hosted by the likes of Scott Hanson and Andrew Siciliano, which have won critical acclaimed and served as a central hub for Olympics fans of all kinds.
In years past, NBC has used its variety of linear and digital platforms to offer wall-to-wall coverage across various networks, apps, and digital platforms. It’s a much easier message for NBC to simply say to viewers “go to Peacock” and they have responded in a big way.
