The Paris Summer Olympics reached the 40 million mark on Sunday, if it took a few combinations to get there.
Sunday’s “primetime” coverage of the Paris Summer Olympics averaged a combined 41.5 million viewers on the NBC family of networks (per Nielsen fast-nationals and Adobe Analytics), a figure that encompasses both a live afternoon window from 2-5 PM ET and a primetime encore — up 91% from the first Sunday of the COVID-delayed Tokyo Summer Games three years ago (21.7M).
The live afternoon audience is comprised of all NBC platforms, including the broadcast network, Peacock, USA Network, CNBC, E!, Paris Extra 1, Paris Extra 2 and more. The primetime audience consists of viewership across NBC, Peacock and USA.
Across the live afternoon and primetime encore presentations, the first three nights of the Olympics have averaged 34.5 million viewers on the full suite of NBC networks — up 79% from Tokyo in ’21 (19.3M).
NBC has combined viewership figures across multiple networks in the past, but not to this extent. For the Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2021 Olympics, the combined primetime figure spanned only NBC, Peacock and one or two cable networks. Because NBC is airing most of its usual primetime fare during the day, its primetime window includes all of the networks carrying events during that 2-5 PM ET window it has designated as “primetime” (aka all of them).
Not included in the “primetime” figure is an audience of 10.9 million for the United States-Serbia men’s basketball game, a figure that exceeds the Toyko gold medal game (United States-France: 9.3M) and is not far off the average for this year’s Celtics-Mavericks NBA Finals (11.3M). (Keep in mind the NBA Finals average is Nielsen-only, as opposed to the combined Nielsen/Adobe Analytics figure NBC uses.)
In other Team USA action, the women’s soccer opener against Germany averaged 4.2 million across USA and Peacock, a figure that is included in the primetime number — marking the most-watched Olympic soccer match, regardless of gender, since the 2012 Games.
With a streaming audience of 6.0 million across Peacock and other NBC digital platforms, Sunday’s Nielsen-only audience is in the neighborhood of 35.5 million. Given the changes in measurement between this year’s Olympics and previous editions — including the addition of Nielsen out-of-home viewing, which was not included in the company’s estimates prior to 2020 — comparisons to earlier Olympics are apples-to-oranges. The comparable night of the Rio 2016 Olympics averaged 34.0 million across NBC, NBCSN and Bravo, but that was for a solo primetime window (as opposed to the combined live and encore).
Given the number of combinations — across the afternoon and primetime, across all of the NBC networks, across Nielsen and Adobe — it is simply not possible to render a useful comparison to London or prior Games, when viewership consisted of a solo primetime window on a solo network measured by one company. (Of course, any comparison to 2012 or earlier years is bound to be apples-to-oranges simply because of the amount of time that has passed.)
