On a day highlighted by Noah Lyles’ thrilling win in the men’s 100m final, NBC delivered its second-largest combined audience of the Olympic Games.
Sunday’s “primetime” coverage of the Paris Summer Olympics averaged 35.4 million viewers, a figure that combines a live afternoon airing and primetime replay, the full suite of NBC platforms, and the measurement companies Nielsen and Adobe Analytics — up 103% from the equivalent day of the COVID-delayed Tokyo Olympics three years ago (17.4M). With a streaming audience of 4.4 million measured by Adobe Analytics, the Nielsen-only viewership figure would clock in around 31 million.
The combined figure is the second-largest of the Olympics thus far, behind the previous Sunday’s 41.5 million.
NBC’s “primetime” Olympics window is now averaging 33.0 million viewers, up 80% from Tokyo (18.3M). Paris is the first Olympics for which NBC is airing its usual primetime fare live in the afternoon, and as such the first for which the network is presenting a combined afternoon and primetime figure. It is only the third Summer Olympics — joining Tokyo three years ago and Rio in 2016 — in which NBC’s primetime audience includes concurrent cable telecasts and streaming viewership tracked by Adobe Analytics.
This year’s ten-night average is nominally on the same level as London in 2012, when primetime coverage averaged 33.6 million through the second Sunday. However, that 2012 average was for a single network on single window measured by a single company, albeit at a time when linear television viewing was far more common than it is today.
Individual figures for Sunday’s key events — including Lyles’ narrow win in the men’s 100m final, Suni Lee’s bronze medal win in the gymnastics uneven bars, and the U.S. women’s basketball team game against Germany — were not immediately available.
