On Saturday, some of the biggest stars on Team USA across all sports including Simone Biles, Katie Ledecky, Sha’Carri Richardson, and the Team USA Basketball Team all participated in their respective events. And naturally, this led to a big ratings boom for NBC.
According to Nielsen fast-nationals and Adobe Analytics via Sports Media Watch, NBC’s “primetime” coverage of the Paris Olympics on Saturday (from 2 P.M. to 11 P.M.) brought in a combined 34.6 million viewers across all of NBC’s platforms, which include Peacock, NBC’s streaming platform that has already seen their biggest viewership numbers across any Olympic Games.
Peacock was a big winner once again on Saturday due to the production of both the Paris Olympics and WWE’s SummerSlam on the platform, leading to the third-most usage ever on Peacock according to an NBC press release.
This actually didn’t even include the Women’s gymnastics vault competition involving Simone Biles, which took place before the 2 P.M. “primetime” coverage started. The Men’s USA Basketball matchup against Puerto Rico was also not included as it was in the late-morning window. averaging a combined 9.4 million on NBC in a late-morning window.
These numbers for NBC compare quite favorably to the equivalent night of the COVID-delayed Tokyo Olympics, which brought in 16.4 million viewers.
It is the second-highest number of viewers for any day of the Olympics thus far, only being bested on July 28th where a total of 41.5 million viewers tuned into the event.
While there have been some controversies that have emerged from this year’s games, most notably with the opening ceremony, NBC’s production of the games has largely been a huge success.
[Sports Media Watch, NBC Sports]
About Reice Shipley
Reice Shipley is a staff writer for Comeback Media that graduated from Ithaca College with a degree in Sports Media. He previously worked at Barrett Sports Media and is a fan of all things Syracuse sports.