Olympics Draw Massive Crowds: NBCUniversal Sees Record-Breaking Viewership on Opening Weekend!

The opening weekend of the 2024 Olympics has NBC Universal exclaiming “Vive la France.”

Simone Biles competes on the balance beam on day two of the Olympic Games in Paris. NAOMI BAKER/GETTY IMAGES

In the first three full days of the games, NBCU is averaging 34.5 million viewers across all its linear networks and digital platforms for its main broadcasts. These ratings include “Paris Prime” — 2-5 p.m. ET in the United States, featuring live medal events — and the U.S. primetime telecasts.

Following an audience of 28.6 million viewers for Friday’s opening ceremony, the weekend broadcasts saw an increase: Saturday attracted 32.4 million viewers, and Sunday — which marked the first day of competition for Simone Biles and the U.S. women’s gymnastics team — drew in 41.5 million viewers, based on custom fast national ratings from Nielsen (for linear broadcasts) and Adobe Analytics (for streaming and digital).

The 34.5 million viewer average over the first three days marks a 79 percent increase from the 19.3 million viewers during the same period of the last Summer Olympics in Tokyo three years ago.

While comparisons to previous Summer Olympics aren’t entirely direct—Nielsen only began including out-of-home viewing in daily ratings in 2020, and NBCUniversal’s streaming presence has since grown significantly—the Paris games are performing well.

They compare favorably to the 2016 games (27.27 million viewer average over the first three days) and are close to the 2012 games (35.13 million).

On Sunday, Peacock and NBCU’s other digital platforms averaged 6 million viewers. Both Saturday and Sunday were the second and third biggest days in Peacock’s history, trailing only the day it streamed an NFL playoff game in January.

Through Sunday (and including some pre-opening ceremony competition), Peacock and NBCU’s digital platforms have amassed 4.5 billion minutes of streaming—exceeding the total from the entire Tokyo Olympics (4.48 billion minutes).

NBC Sports reports that the U.S. men’s basketball team’s opening game, a 110-84 victory over Serbia, drew 10.9 million viewers on NBC and Peacock—surpassing the gold medal game (9.3 million) from Tokyo.

The U.S. women’s soccer team’s 4-1 win over Germany averaged 4.2 million viewers on USA Network and Peacock, outdoing every soccer match (men’s and women’s) from the last two summer games.