Ratings for the Beijing Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony for 2022 have hit a new low for linear television after NBC says on average 16 million people tuned into the telecast on Friday, according to preliminary data.
That’s down 43% from the 2018 winter games in PyeongChang, in which 28.3 million viewers tuned in. And it’s also below last year’s Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony in Tokyo, in which the four-hour telecast averaged 17 million viewers. Before that, the previous low over the last three decades was the 1992 Barcelona games, which had 21.6 million viewers.
The Beijing opening ceremony aired live on NBC and streamed on the Peacock streaming service beginning at 6:30 AM ET on Friday morning, and it then aired again during primetime.