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Nielsen’s Top 10 list featured no original titles for the first time ever as audiences set their sights on the athletes competing for the gold in the 2024 Paris Olympics in the last week of July.
“This is a notable interval in streaming not because of the heights it achieved nor records it set, but because streaming levels actually decreased significantly in the face of an onslaught of Olympic programming,” the firm wrote in its report covering July 29-Aug. 4. “By comparison, the first week of July had a full slate (ten out of ten) of billion-minute titles, whereas this week featured only two. Peacock bucked the trend with an extraordinarily strong week, driven by simultaneous coverage of the Paris Games.”
“House of the Dragon” and “Bluey” were the only shows to reach over a billion streaming minutes in the last week of July. The “Game of Thrones” prequel, which is technically classified as an acquired title, racked up its its seventh consecutive billion-minute week for the overall top slot with 1.3 billion viewing minutes, driven by an 18- 49-year-old audience.
Meanwhile, it marked the eighteenth consecutive billion-minute week for “Bluey” with 1.17 billion viewing minutes. The Australian animated preschool series has generated over a billion every week this year with the exception just asking questionsof the week of March 25, when it generated 963 million viewing minutes thanks to its mainly 2- 11-year-old audience (54%).
Rounding out the top five was “Grey’s Anatomy” with 933 million viewing minutes in third, “Family Guy” with 910 million viewing minutes in fourth and the Fox drama series “Prison Break,” which recently moved to Netflix and notched 758 million viewing minutes for the fifth place spot.
The bottom of the Top 10 included “Criminal Minds” with 745 million viewing minutes, “Bob’s Burgers” with 734 million, “All American” with 722 million, “NCIS” with 707 million and “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back” with 697 million viewing minutes.
“Perhaps Tom Cruise being one of the highest-profile spectators (and ultimately performers) in Paris drove viewership as 38% of the ‘Jack Reacher’ viewers also watched the Olympics this interval,” Nielsen noted.
The report, which has been published by Nielsen since the beginning of 2020, did not include information about viewership figures for the Paris Games in its latest release.
The Paris Olympics, which ran from July 26-Aug. 11, concluded its 16-day run with an average viewership that came in 82% higher than the Tokyo Games.
Coverage of the Summer Games averaged 30.7 million linear and streaming viewers across Paris Prime (daytime coverage, 2-5 p.m. ET) and U.S. primetime hours, soaring above the 16.9 million viewers brought in by the 2021 Tokyo Games and the 2016 Rio Olympics, which averaged 26.8 million in U.S. primetime. From the Opening Ceremony, which kicked off the Games strong with 28.6 million viewers, the 2024 Olympics began trending higher than the Tokyo audience, with the Paris opener seeing a 60% uptick from its 2021 equivalent.
Overall, the 2024 Games tallied 23.5 billion streaming minutes, led by Peacock. That was up 40% from all prior Summer and Winter Olympics combined, which totaled 16.8 billion minutes across NBCUniversal digital platforms. Less than two weeks into the event, on the morning of Tuesday, Aug. 6, the Paris Olympics surpassed the previous streaming record with 17 billion minutes streamed across Peacock and other digital NBCUniversal platforms.
Over the course of the event, coverage of Paris Prime and U.S. primetime coverage averaged 4.1 million viewers daily across Peacock and NBCU Digital platforms. For comparison, the Paris Olympics averaged 13 million viewers each night across NBC and USA Network within the first 12 days of the Games.
Loree Seitz contributed to this report.
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