If there was any question whether viewers would gravitate toward the marquee Olympic events outside of primetime, nearly 13 million watched Simone Biles and the women’s gymnastics team win gold on a Tuesday afternoon.
Tuesday’s Olympic women’s gymnastics team final averaged 12.7 million viewers on NBC and Peacock (per Nielsen and Adobe Analytics), which NBC says ranks among the most-watched daytime Olympic telecasts ever on the network. An exact ranking is not possible, as NBC does not generally break down its Olympic viewership by event and it is not known whether any individual event from past years might have been higher.
The competition began at 12:15 PM ET and ended at 2:30, meaning that only the last half-hour of the live broadcast was factored into NBC’s primetime viewership.
Speaking of, the “primetime” audience was 34.7 million across a live 2-5 PM ET window and 8-11 PM replay — a figure that includes all of the NBC networks airing events during those respective time periods. Compared to the equivalent night of the COVID-delayed Tokyo Olympics three years ago, that figure is up 89% from 18.4 million.
The “primetime” window is now averaging 34.0 million viewers through four nights, up 79% from 19 million three years ago.
Thus far, the actual primetime windows have been outperforming the live afternoon broadcasts. A breakdown for Tuesday was not immediately available, but on Monday, “Primetime in Paris” drew 19.3 million across all NBC platforms and the daytime window had 12.0 million.
As one would expect, the gap was smaller on the weekend. Sunday’s primetime window averaged 23.2 million across the NBC networks, compared to 18.3 million for live action earlier in the day, and Saturday’s drew 17.1 million — barely ahead of 15.4 million during the day.
This is the first Olympics in which NBC is presenting its usual primetime fare live during the day, and as such the first Olympics in which the network is presenting a combined afternoon and primetime figure.
