Summer Olympics viewership cooled a bit Wednesday night — no surprise given the lack of women’s gymnastics — but did not fall too far off pace.
Wednesday’s “primetime” coverage of the Paris Summer Olympics averaged a combined 29.1 million viewers across the full suite of NBC networks (per Nielsen fast-nationals and Adobe Analytics), a figure that encompasses live afternoon coverage from 2-5 PM ET and a primetime encore — up 80% from the comparable night of the COVID-delayed Tokyo Olympics three years ago (16.1M).
The combined audience slipped under 30 million for just the second time in this Olympics, joining the Opening Ceremony (28.6M).
Figures include the United States-South Sudan men’s basketball game on USA Network and Peacock, which averaged a combined 4.3 million — surpassing all basketball games during the two prior Olympics, excluding the gold medal game. (Sunday’s United States-Serbia men’s game ranks higher with 10.9 million, but that was on the NBC broadcast network.)
Because NBC is carrying its usual primetime fare during the afternoon, all of the daytime programming during that window — across all networks — is being factored into the primetime audience, including events that would not have typically been included in past Olympics.
As has been noted repeatedly, viewership for this year’s Olympics is not directly comparable to past years. This year’s Olympics is the first in which NBC is airing its primetime events during the day, and thus the first in which it is presenting a combined audience across day and night. It is only the third Summer Olympics — joining Tokyo three years ago and Rio in 2016 — in which NBC’s primetime window has included competing Olympic coverage on its other networks, and also only the third in which NBC is adding its Adobe Analytics-measured streaming audience to the Nielsen-issued figure.
If one goes back to London 2012, NBC’s primetime audience was for a single telecast on a single network measured by a single company, in an entirely different era of television when Nielsen audiences consisted solely of in-home viewing and tens of millions more viewers were consuming television on a nightly basis.
