Winter Olympics viewership continues to rebound from the lows of Beijing four years ago.
Through Tuesday, NBC’s “primetime” coverage of the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics is averaging a combined 23.8 million viewers across a live afternoon window and primetime replay — a figure that combines a mix of preliminary and final Nielsen data with streaming viewership measured by Adobe Analytics — up 86% from the same point of the Beijing Winter Olympics four years ago (12.8M).
As was the case in Paris two years ago, NBC is airing its usual primetime fare live during the day — allowing it to combine the audiences for its live “Milan Prime” window and its “Primetime in Milan” encore presentation. The “primetime” audience thus consists of all Olympic programming on the NBC family of networks during “Milan Prime,” from primetime staples like figure skating to events like men’s and women’s hockey that have not traditionally aired in the primetime window.
NBC is comparing this year’s numbers to a similar combination of live and primetime coverage in Beijing four years ago. In Beijing, live events typically aired in the primetime, late night and early morning windows, with encore coverage in the afternoons. It was not immediately clear which of those windows are being included in NBC’s comparable Beijing figure.
This year’s combined audience has topped 20 million on all 12 days of the Games, with Tuesday’s coverage averaging 20.2 million (per preliminary Nielsen data). At least early on, the majority of that audience has been watching during the primetime windows — particularly on weeknights — but the afternoon windows were accounting for at least a third.
Comparisons to prior Olympics are complicated by Nielsen’s various methodological changes. This year’s Olympics is just the fourth since Nielsen began tracking out-of-home viewing in its estimates in 2020, and the first since the company expanded its out-of-home sample to cover 100 percent of markets in the lower 48 states. It is also the first Olympics since Nielsen shifted last September to a new methodology that combines its traditional panel with “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes.
Viewership is up so much over Beijing in 2022 — the least-watched Olympics ever in primetime — that it cannot be attributed mainly to changes in how the numbers are measured by Nielsen and reported by NBC. But those changes will skew comparisons to any other past Olympics, even a semi-recent one like PyeongChang in 2018. NBC’s primetime windows were averaging 21.1 million at this point in PyeongChang, but that was an in-home only, primetime only figure (albeit during an era of greater television viewing).
As for specific sports, United States men’s hockey group stage games averaged 4.3 million, the highest for U.S. games during the round since 2002. On the women’s side, Monday’s United Stats-Sweden semifinal averaged 4.0 million — the highest for that competition since the 2014 United States-Canada gold medal game (4.9M). It might go without saying that comparisons to prior Olympics are skewed by Nielsen changes.
