The addition of live afternoon viewing is principally responsible for NBC’s “primetime” success in the Paris Summer Olympics, but the majority of the audience continues to watch the actual primetime show.
Through Monday, “primetime” coverage of the Paris Summer Olympics has averaged 32.6 million viewers combined across a live afternoon window and primetime replay, the full suite of NBC networks, and the measurement companies Nielsen and Adobe Analytics — up 79% from the first eleven nights of the COVID-delayed Tokyo Olympics three years ago (18.2M).
Paris is the first Olympics in which NBC is airing its usual primetime fare live during the afternoon, a shift from the previous practice of either airing those events on tape delay or lobbying organizers to schedule them for primetime on the U.S. East Coast. The addition of the live afternoon broadcast is the main reason why viewership has returned to the 30 million mark, but it is worth noting that the primetime show is still garnering a majority of the audience — nearly two-thirds — with an average of 20.0 million.
There are no apples-to-apples comparisons to past Olympics, but NBC’s 11-night average exceeds Rio in 2016 (29.5M) and is nearly on par with London in 2012 (33.1M). That comes with a laundry list of caveats, including the addition of the live afternoon airing, the combination of all NBC platforms, the combination of multiple measurement companies, and even the addition of Nielsen out-of-home viewing — which was not included in viewership estimates prior to 2020.
Monday’s “primetime” coverage averaged 29.1 million viewers, up 70% from the second Monday of the Tokyo Games (17.1M). As the afternoon version of the primetime show runs from 2-5 PM ET, figures exclude live coverage of the gymnastics competition, which aired early in the morning. The Monday show was just the third of 11 to average a combined audience under 30 million, though that number will grow as the second week of the Summer Olympics is typically lesser-watched than the first.
