To return Olympic viewership to the exalted levels of London, it took a slew of gold medals for the highest-profile Americans, an iconic host city with world-famous landmarks, and a methodology heavy on combined viewership.
NBC’s “primetime” coverage of the Paris Summer Olympics averaged a combined 30.7 million viewers across the full suite of NBC platforms (per Nielsen and Adobe Analytics), a figure that includes a live daytime window and primetime replay — up 82% from the COVID-delayed Tokyo Olympics in 2021 (16.9M). With a streaming average of 4.1 million viewers measured by Adobe Analytics, the Nielsen-only average would come in around 26.6 million.
Paris was the first Olympics in which NBC aired its usual primetime fare live during the afternoon. As a result, the network issued a combined afternoon and primetime figure encompassing live coverage from 2-5 PM ET and a primetime replay from 8-11. The combined figure includes all of the NBC networks carrying Olympic coverage during those respective windows, and thus a number of events that would not have typically counted toward primetime — for example, basketball and soccer — are included in this year’s average.
The marked shift in methodology renders any comparisons to past Olympics shaky at best. This year’s average is nominally on par with London in 2012 (31.1M), but that average was for a single primetime window on a single network measured by a single company that solely measured in-home viewing.
As noted in a a fuller Olympics recap published Monday, NBC was the beneficiary of vastly improved conditions over the previous Olympics in Tokyo — including Simone Biles’ return to gold medal form and victories for many of the highest-profile Americans, from Sha’Carri Richardson and Stephen Curry in their Olympic debuts, to Noah Lyles and Katie Ledecky. Add to that the iconic host city of Paris and the return of fans for the first time since 2018.
One event not included in the primetime average was Sunday’s United States-France women’s basketball gold medal game, which aired in a morning window and averaged 7.8 million viewers across NBC and Peacock — down slightly from 7.9 million for the 2021 game, which aired in primetime.
The United States’ narrow win, which peaked with 10.9 million from 11-11:30 AM ET, ranks fourth among women’s basketball games this year — trailing the South Carolina-Iowa NCAA women’s basketball title game (19.5M), Iowa-UConn in the Final Four (14.4M) and Iowa-LSU in the Elite Eight (12.3M).
As for the other gold medal games, viewership for Saturday’s United States-France men’s basketball final has been updated from 19.5 to 20.3 million, with the peak audience increasing from 22.7 to 23.9 million. The updated figure surpasses the 2019 NCAA men’s basketball final between Virginia and Texas Tech (19.6M) to rank as the largest basketball audience since Game 5 of the 2017 NBA Finals (Cavaliers-Warriors: 24.5M). (All NBC figures are a combined total of Nielsen and Adobe Analytics, while all other network estimates are Nielsen only.)
In addition, viewership for the USA-Brazil women’s soccer final has been updated from 9.0 to 9.4 million, still the highest for a gold medal game in that sport since 2004.
