The results are in from the 2016 Summer Olympics, and aside from the remarkable achievements of the many American athletes who dazzled audiences around the world, NBCUniversal also snagged a few victories of its own with its coverage of the competition in Rio.
According to Nielsen, 78 percent of U.S. TV homes tuned into NBC Olympics Rio Games coverage. This year’s coverage also earned the silver medal for garnering the second-highest primetime average audience on record for any non-domestic Olympic Summer Games. NBC’s Olympics coverage, which spanned 15 days of the competition, reached an average of 27.5 million viewers on primetime, which includes digital, cable and broadcast viewers. The peak day? That would be August 9. You may have been watching too as 36.1 million viewers tuned in to see superstars Michael Phelps, Katie Ledecky and Simone Biles clinch gold medals for the U.S.A. in their respective individual and team events.
The Olympic Games also reached a significant milestone this year when it came to how people watched the competition online. For one, this marked the first Olympic Games that broadcast network coverage including primetime were streamed simultaneously on digital platforms. NBC Olympics’ digital coverage hit 3.3 billion total streaming minutes, 2.71 billion live-streaming minutes, and 100 million unique users. This total eclipses the combined amount of all previous games streamed since the network’s first live-streaming of the Olympics began in 2006 for the Winter Games.
We witnessed an exciting moment in sports television as audiences across the country discovered not only the multiple ways they could digitally tune into the Olympics, but also discovered the events they really wanted to watch, whenever, wherever and however they wanted to.
And as NBC Sports Group Chairman Mark Lazarus said, “Probably our biggest surprise in the consumption metrics was that more than 1/3 of those who streamed coverage did so from connected TV devices—meaning those people were in front of their TVs watching the Olympics, but in a different way.”
We have four more years until Tokyo to see where TV Everywhere takes us for the next Summer Olympic Games. Until then!