As with the Paris Summer Olympics 18 months ago, the combination of live afternoon and primetime windows has boosted NBC’s audience for the Milan-Cortina Winter Games.
NBC’s “primetime” coverage of the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics is averaging 26.5 million viewers across all of its platforms (including Versant-owned USA Network and CNBC), per a combination of Nielsen and Adobe Analytics — nearly doubling the comparable point of the previous Winter Games from Beijing four years ago (13.7M).
Those comparisons come with no shortage of caveats. Repeating its approach from the Paris Summer Olympics, NBC is airing its usual primetime fare live during the day — allowing it to combine its “Primetime in Milan” audience with a live afternoon window (“Milan Prime”) that airs across multiple networks. NBC said it is comparing this year’s numbers to a similar combination of live and primetime figures in Beijing. (A previous version of this post said that the Beijing figures were for the primetime window only.)
In addition, this year’s Olympics is the first since the Nielsen methodological changes of the past year — specifically the expansion of its out-of-home viewing sample and its shift to a new currency that combines its traditional panel with “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes. Those changes generally benefit sports viewership.
Finally, Beijing — like the Tokyo Summer Olympics the prior year — set a historically low bar, taking place during the COVID-related sports viewing slump that resulted in record-lows across the industry.
As one would expect, the most-watched telecast of the Games thus far was Sunday’s Super Bowl lead-out, which drew a Nielsen-only 8.9 rating and 20.02 million viewers on NBC alone — actually down from a 9.8 and 21.28 million for the same post-Super Bowl window in 2022.
NBC said Tuesday that Sunday’s coverage averaged 42 million across the lead-out show and the live “Milan Prime” airing, but with NBC carrying Super Bowl pregame coverage throughout the afternoon, it was not entirely clear which telecast windows were included in that figure. USA Network averaged a 2.6 and 5.35 million for its afternoon coverage (including Peacock), and NBC drew a 2.6 and 4.70 million for its morning window. But even adding those two figures to the lead-out show, the combined audience still falls well short of 42 million.
As for the other nights thus far, last Friday’s Opening Ceremony averaged a 3.0 and 5.74 million for the live daytime portion and a 6.3 and 13.26 million in primetime. Saturday’s primetime coverage averaged a 5.5 and 11.45 million, with morning and afternoon coverage at a 3.8 and 7.03 million over 11 hours.
