Linear Olympics ratings soar 79%, streaming minutes surpass Tokyo total in first three days

The 2024 Summer Olympics are proving to be ratings gold for NBCUniversal.

The first three days of the games, Friday, July 26, 2024, through Sunday, July 28, 2024, saw an average audience of 34.5 million viewers.

That figure includes linear and digital platforms during the 2 to 5 p.m. time period as well as primetime telecasts.

NBCU already scored big with its telecasts of the opening ceremony, with attracted 28.6 million viewers, a significant boost over the low-rated 2020 Olympics opener held in 2021 in Tokyo, Japan. Overall ratings for Tokyo were down significantly as well.

July 26, the first full day of competition after the opening ceremony, saw 32.4 million total viewers. Sunday soared to 41.5 million, according to initial estimates from Adobe Analytics and Nielsen. 

Ratings are up around 79% overall, from just 19.3 million viewers during the first three days of Tokyo.

In addition to these impressive figures, initial estimates show that, just three days in, Paris games have already surpassed the cumulative total of streaming minutes for Tokyo, with 4.5 billion streaming minutes.

During the delayed 2020 games in 2021, NBCU recorded 4.48 billion streaming minutes across all of its platforms.

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The massive boost in streaming speaks to how much digital has grown in the three years since Tokyo. While Toyko featured extensive streaming coverage, Peacock was only about a year old at the time; having launched April 15, 2020, originally planned to help feed into 2020 Summer Olympics coverage.

Tokyo also took place under heavy COVID-19 protocols, with many events run with minimal or no in-person spectators, though 2021 was also a key year of growth for streaming given both market conditions and many people still relying heavily on at-home entertainment over in-person events as COVID-19 cases, driven by the Delta variant, increased during the summer of 2021.