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Thursday’s Olympic coverage maintained a steady viewership as Simone Biles and Suni Lee competed in the gymnastics all-around.
As viewers tuned in to watch Biles and Suni claim their gold and bronze medals, respectively, as well as victories for team U.S.A. across swimming, rowing and fencing, Thursday coverage brought in 31.7 million viewers across NBC, Peacock, and other NBCUniversal platforms, according to data from Nielsen and Adobe Analytics. Of those viewers, 4.4 million viewers tuned in on Peacock and NBCUniversal digital platforms.
During coverage of the women’s gymnastics all-around, which ran from approximately 12:15-2:30 p.m., an audience of 10.9 million viewers tuned in to see Biles and Lee take their spots on the Olympic podium.
Thursday’s overall viewership was up 50% when compared to the comparable Thursday of competition during the Tokyo Olympics, which brought in 21.1 million across all platforms. Throughout the first week of the 2024 Olympics, viewership has been comparatively higher than that of Tokyo, with the Paris Games seeing a 77% increase in viewership in their first four days of programming.
Over the first six days of competition, which kicked off with Friday’s opening ceremony, viewership for the combined Paris Prime (2-5 p.m. ET) and U.S. primetime (8-11 p.m. ET/PT) has reached 33.0 million — up 76% from Tokyo, when the comparable timeframe brought in 18.8 million viewers.
On streaming alone, Paris Olympic coverage has tallied up 10.6 billion minutes — led by Peacock — and becomes the first-ever Summer Games to surpass 10 billion streaming minutes, outpacing the 9.8 billion combined minutes streamed for the Tokyo, Rio, London and Beijing Olympics across NBCUniversal digital platforms.
NBC News has also seen a viewership boost during the Olympics’ first week, with “Today” and “NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt” ranked as the No. 1 most-watched broadcast news network with 3.1 million and 8 million viewers, respectively, tuning in between Friday and Wednesday. The shows also came first when in the key demos among adults 25-54 and adults 18-49.
