NBCUniversal will always have Paris — the setting for a huge bounceback for its Summer efforts. The company says the 2024 Olympics, which closed Sunday with a ceremony from Stade de France and a in Los Angeles, averaged a combined 30.6 million viewers across all platforms for its “Paris Prime” daytime telecast (2-5 p.
m. ET in the United States) and nightly primetime shows. That’s a huge improvement — 82 percent — on the last Summer Olympics three years ago in Tokyo, which averaged 16.
9 million cross-platform viewers for daytime and prime telecasts. The Tokyo games were contested in largely empty venues due to COVID lockdowns, from a city with a much more significant time difference with the U.S.
than Paris has. NBCU also significantly ramped up its streaming presence on and other digital platforms this year, resulting in widely praised live coverage of every sport and medal event. The audience for the 2024 Olympics also compares favorably to those in both 2016 (26 million viewers) and 2012 (30.
3 million), though streaming was a much, much smaller component of those games. They also aired in a time before Nielsen included out of home viewing in its daily numbers. The set a streaming record (dating back to 2008, when NBCU first offered live streams of Olympic events) with 23.
5 billion minutes of viewing time on Peacock and the company’s other digital outlets. That’s 40 percent higher than the combined total of 16.8 billion minutes for all prior Olympics (summer .