Were the Paris Olympics the greatest ever? They were on TV and streaming

It feels like a lifetime ago, before Léon Marchand had a nation cheering his every stroke at La Défense Arena, before Simone Biles had us out of our seats watching the women’s gymnastics all-around competition, before Steph Curry put the French crowd to sleep at Bercy Arena, and before the U.S. women’s basketball team eked out a thrilling finish for its eighth straight gold medal, there was a looming question that hung over the Paris Games as the world arrived in the City of Light.

Could the Olympics get its groove back?

Prior to Paris, Olympic viewership had tumbled significantly in recent cycles. The COVID-moved Tokyo Olympics averaged 15.6 million viewers per night in 2021 across NBC’s various television and digital platforms. The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics averaged 11.4 million across all platforms, the least-watched Olympics in the modern era. It was a sharp decline from the 19.8 million average for the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

But the Olympics bloomed again in France’s capital. Beginning with the opening ceremony through Saturday, NBCUniversal posted a 16-day total audience delivery average of 31.3 million viewers across the combined live Paris Prime (2-5 p.m. ET) and U.S. prime time (8-11 p.m. ET/PT). The final numbers will be in this week. Some of the viewership data was simply extraordinary, including 12.7 million viewers on NBC and Peacock live on a Tuesday afternoon to see Biles and Team USA win gymnastics gold.

As we have noted throughout, there is important context: NBC rolled up its numbers for the Paris Games to include live viewership from 2-5 p.m. ET featuring NBC, Peacock, USA Network, CNBC, E!, Paris Extra 1, Paris Extra 2 and additional NBCU digital platforms, as well as U.S. prime-time viewership on NBC, Peacock and USA Network. (Total audience delivery is based upon live-plus-same day custom fast national figures from Nielsen and digital data from Adobe Analytics.) The network said the revised methodology was a more accurate way to present viewership information for Paris because viewers had never before had the option to watch a live fully produced Olympics on NBC or Peacock in the daytime in addition to the traditional prime time (which was a curated presentation given the competition day had ended in Paris, six hours ahead of Eastern time in the U.S.). That’s how they sold it to advertisers.

“We decided to be progressive in our thinking about how we present the Games,” said Mark Lazarus, the chairman of NBCUniversal Media Group in an interview late last week. “We chose to modernize our production and our presentation of the Games. When we changed our methodology on presentation, we changed the methodology in conjunction with the marketing community.”

I think these have been the best Olympics of my lifetime, and I say that as someone who covered the Olympics on-site in Salt Lake City, Athens, Turin, Beijing, Vancouver, London and Sochi. Unlike covering the Games in person, I experienced these Games via NBC and Peacock, and the combination of being able to process events live on Peacock and elsewhere, and then watch a curated presentation was an excellent experience.

With the Olympic flame over Paris now extinguished, here are 20 media-centric thoughts and reported items on the Paris Games.

1. NBC leaned heavily on celebrity for its presentation, and you should expect this for future Olympics. The opening ceremony featured Kelly Clarkson and Peyton Manning. The closing ceremony featured Jimmy Fallon. You could not go a day without seeing Snoop Dogg. There were endless crowd shots of famous people (hey, John Travolta) in the crowd.

There were times the celebrity-drenched coverage felt too much, but NBC makes no apologies. They see the Olympics as a mix of sport and entertainment, especially when the time difference does not offer live sports in prime time.

“We did research over what’s been going well and what’s not over the last bunch of Games, and we thought about how we could bring up the Q score value of our broadcast,” said Lazarus. “Now Paris did some of that on its own. Some of the people that are here, we had nothing to do with them being here. We’re not dwelling on them, but we’re definitely taking a shot of them in the crowd if it’s relevant to our audiences or interesting to the American public.”

2. NBC’s “Gold Zone” coverage, an “NFL RedZone”-inspired whip-around show that streamed daily from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Peacock, was an addictive and uber-modern way to watch the Games. It ranked in the top five most-watched Olympics titles on Peacock and was a technological success given all the elements at play.

Scott Hanson, who has served as the host of “NFL RedZone” since its inaugural season in 2009 and is also an NFL Network host, was a genius hire, and NBC got a free run of positive press from that move alone. Fellow hosts Matt Iseman, Andrew Siciliano and Jac Collinsworth provided the requisite high-energy metabolism needed for the production. “Gold Zone” was one of the massive successes of these games for NBCU.

3. The top broadcast medalists for me were the primary race callers for the track and field competition — NBC’s Leigh Diffey and Rob Walker of the Olympic Broadcasting Service (the world feed). Diffey was phenomenal on his calls, particularly 0n Quincy Hall winning the men’s 400.

NEVER doubt Quincy Hall. 😱

A EPIC comeback to win 400m GOLD! #ParisOlympics

📺 NBC & Peacock pic.twitter.com/qQJqfxrH9n

— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) August 7, 2024

Same with Cole Hocker’s win in the men’s 1500.

AN UPSET IN THE MEN’S 1500M! 🤯

Cole Hocker surges on the final stretch for OLYMPIC GOLD.

📺 #ParisOlympics on NBC and Peacock pic.twitter.com/4ElH2uxckn

— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) August 7, 2024

Yeah, he missed the Noah Lyles call, but I give grace for things like that because he doesn’t have the benefit of a delete key as I do. NBC’s track and field group of Diffey, Sanya Richards-Ross, Ato Boldon, Kara Goucher, Trey Hardee, Paul Swangard and Lewis Johnson were consistently excellent during the meet. Walker’s calls could be heard on Peacock if you watched the coverage, and the Brit really knows how to call a race. Also, Noah Eagle and LaChina Robinson were sensational in calling the Americans’ 67-66 win over France in the women’s basketball gold-medal game on Sunday.

4. Laurie Hernandez showed an innate gift to communicate gymnastics to a broad audience combined with genuine enthusiasm for the success of her former teammates (she and Biles won gold in the team competition at the 2016 Rio Olympics). It made for an exceptional viewing experience if you watched women’s gymnastics live on Peacock.

5. I thought NBC’s swimming coverage went incredibly light on the revelations in recent months about dozens of positive drug tests among Chinese swimmers. It’s a global story and one that was particularly significant on the final day of swimming as China won gold in the men’s 4×100-meter medley relay. It deserved more than the perfunctory coverage we received on NBC during its prime-time rebroadcast of the swimming competition last Sunday night.

6. There will be a significant number of NBA broadcasting jobs open given NBC and Amazon will enter the market in 2025 as media rights-holders. Given his Hall of Fame profile and the reps he undertook in Paris, Dwyane Wade will get a serious look from networks if he’s interested. Wade said he’s worked with both a speech and vocal coach for preparation.

“When I got asked to do this, I looked at this as probably one of the biggest challenges in my 2024 calendar year,” Wade said. “… I decided to dive into it, understanding that it was going to be a lot of things that was going to be learned on the fly. … Being able to sit right next to Noah (Eagle) … I’ve definitely asked him a lot of questions about this world, stuff that I didn’t know. Something as simple as, ‘Hey, bro, what does No. 1 mean? What is a No. 1 team?’ I don’t know those things. I’m not afraid to say what I don’t know. But most importantly just being myself. That’s the one thing that everyone told me, and that’s what I told myself when I signed up to do this. I’m going to bring my brand of basketball to the airwaves, understanding, just like in life, some people are going to love it. Some people will not love it.”

NBC Sports president Rick Cordella said no talent decisions have been made for NBC’s NBA coverage other than Mike Tirico and Eagle will play significant roles as play-by-play voices. (Tirico will be the No. 1.) But NBC now has a relationship with Wade, and that should seriously count should Wade decide he wants to do this. NBC also needs multiple analysts, so Wade would not have to be on the No. 1 team at the start.

“We’ll sit down this fall and talk about talent in the pregame show, talk about talent on our play-by-play analyst positions,” Cordella said. “We’ll need multiple because we have games on three nights a week.”

Dwyane Wade called U.S. men’s basketball games during these Olympics. It could put him in position to land an NBA job if he wants one. (Jesse D. Garrabrant / NBAE via Getty Images)

7. Look for NBC to take the multi-view feature for the Olympics that was part of the Peacock experience and use it for its coverage of the Premier League.

“It makes the most sense when you have a lot of things going on at once and you don’t get that with Big Ten football or one NFL game at a time,” Cordella said. “But for the Premier League with those Saturday morning windows, you could expect to see that. I don’t know if we’ll have that for launch or not, so don’t hold me to that. … But certainly over time you will see that product feature with that sport.”

8. The biggest surprise for NBC as far as viewership was how many people they were able to get during the day parts of their coverage. An educated guess would be part of the reason is the increase in a work-from-home environment in a post-COVID world.

“We were able to aggregate a significant audience,” Cordella said. “For instance, a men’s basketball game at 11:50 in the morning drew 11 million viewers for that game. Peacock often got close to five million streamers a day. So that’s probably the biggest surprise we had.”

The singular most remarkable afternoon viewership number came on Saturday when NBC and Peacock averaged 19.5 million viewers for the U.S. men’s basketball team’s thrilling 98-87 victory over France. It was the most-watched gold-medal game since the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. The game peaked at 22.7 million viewers from 5-5:15 p.m. ET in the final quarter of the game.

9. How did NBC executives view those who had an issue with parts of the opening ceremony?

“In 7,000 hours, you’re gonna have people who don’t like something, and I understand and respect that,” Lazarus said. “As it relates to the opening ceremonies, we have an outline of what’s going to happen, but there were things we didn’t know were going to happen. I think the way I look at it is we document the proceedings. We didn’t comment on those things that were somewhat controversial. As long as we are taking the role as the group that is just showing the proceedings that are being shown by the organizing committee, and we’re not making commentary about them, I don’t feel we’ve done anything to create a controversy for ourselves.”

10. I asked followers on X to offer thoughts on what they thought of NBC/Peacock’s coverage of the Paris Games. Some really interesting replies here.

11. As I reported last week after talking to NBC Sports brass, I would be stunned if Snoop Dogg is not back for future Olympics.

Snoop Dogg became his own storyline at these Paris Olympics. Except NBC to welcome back for future Games. (Christian Petersen / Getty Images)

12. NBC is always going to have U.S.-centric viewing — and that’s understandable. But they short-changed viewers significantly when it came to the prime-time coverage of the final day of the women’s heptathlon. Belgium’s Nafissatou Thiam won her third successive Olympic women’s heptathlon gold medal — an otherworldly achievement in the sport — but that was barely touched on as the coverage focused heavily on American Anna Hall.

Hall is a phenomenal athlete, she has a great story, and she was a big part of NBC’s marketing promotion heading into the Games. She’s going to be a star in L.A. four years from now. So this isn’t about the coverage she received, there simply had to be a way to give viewers more on Thiam in prime time given this is a once-in-a-century athlete in her event.

13. The point person for NBC’s Olympics production is Molly Solomon, the executive producer and president of NBC Olympics production. She’s the first woman to hold that position. Since covering the Olympics, I’m not sure I have seen NBCU receive better overall social media feedback than they had in Paris, and that matters along with the traditional viewership metrics.

Some of that is, of course, related to how the competition played out (it was a great Olympics for the U.S.), but it’s also related to how the audience perceived the production including how friendly it was for viewers. Solomon sets herself up as the person to lead NBCU on what will be its biggest Olympics and most-anticipated production ever — the Los Angeles Games — four years from now.

14. Will people stay with Peacock after the Games end? The data will come in a couple of months. Cordella said that 70 percent of those who signed up for the NFL wild-card game in January were with Peacock two months after that game.

“We do have some good data on (people) coming in for sports and staying,” he said. “We’re also lucky that this is now mid-August and we’re heading into football season with Big Ten games, NFL games on Peacock, and the exclusive NFL game on Friday of opening weekend in Brazil (Eagles-Packers).”

15. I was very mixed on how NBC presented the opening ceremony, and I would love to see a little more traditional sports or news people be part of it as opposed to the heavy celebrity. (I do not think NBC will follow my wishes here for Italy in 2026 and L.A.)

GO DEEPER

At the Olympic opening ceremony, a force of nature upset the plan but not the point

16. Lazarus said the Olympics will make money for NBCU. “It will exceed our revenue goals, and be more revenue than we’ve ever had before in an Olympics,” he said. “We’ll make a nice profit, and I’m sure at some point, we’ll talk about it on an earnings call.”

17. Lewis Johnson has served as an Olympics reporter for NBC since the Sydney Games — his primary focus for Summer Games is track and field — and he consistently delivers for viewers by asking pertinent questions about why things happened. He also frequently does what someone in his position should do — he takes advantage of his role as a member of the host broadcasting team and uses that access to unearth details for the audience, as he did with Noah Lyles in Paris. Every Olympics I find myself thinking: This guy does an excellent job.

18. Rowdy Gaines said the 2028 Olympics will be his last as an Olympics commentator. NBC has used Michael Phelps as a roving correspondent of sorts for the Paris Games, but when he’s been specifically assigned as a swimming commentator, he has been tremendous for the audience. NBC should really push to get Phelps as the replacement for Gaines, and both should be on swimming in L.A.

19. The live closing ceremony was where NBC’s celebrity push was brutal for Olympic viewers. Ask yourself what Jimmy Fallon added here for viewers? The dude asked Katie Ledecky, “When do you fly home or are you going to swim home?” It’s cross-promotion over value for the audience.

Terry Gannon, Tara Lipinski, Johnny Weir and Tirico were more than good enough for this. Also, on Tirico: This is how you quickly and definitively acknowledge an error.

20. Getty Images photographer Hector Vivas, take a bow. You too, Ezra Shaw. And check out these photos as well.