NBCUniversal’s strategy of making all Paris Summer Olympics events available live is paying off with unexpectedly high daytime viewing.
While that’s good news for the Comcast-owned broadcaster, it might not be great for other businesses. That’s because office productivity is down among Olympic viewers.
During a Thursday press briefing, NBCU said Tuesday’s early-afternoon coverage of women’s gymnastics averaged nearly 13 million viewers across NBC and Peacock, while Sunday’s 11:15 a.m. U.S.-Serbia men’s basketball game attracted 11 million viewers.
“I think where we’re pleasantly surprised that daytime viewership has been as high as it has been particularly on the weekdays,“ NBC Sports president Rick Cordella said. “It’s a point of work from home or summer. But that’s something that I don’t think has really happened in the past.
“It’s great to see in the afternoon, Paris Prime, as we’ve called it, where we’ve seen enormous numbers,” he added. “Our strategy of making everything available live in the afternoon with fully produced, prime-time quality productions across our widest platforms, the biggest events, it’s something we’ve never done before.”
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NBCU did some research and found that one in four Olympics viewers said their work productivity declined during the Olympics, said Molly Solomon, executive producer and president of NBC Olympics Production.
On top of that two in three people said the Olympics provide an escape, and half said they’ve changed their daily routine to to watch the Games.
“America is captivated and there’s a lack of productivity in a lot of workplaces and we’re here, ready for it,” Solomon said. “We set the goal early on to make sure that America is unproductive all day long.”
The daytime viewing doesn’t appear to be hurting primetime, where NBC is averaging 34 million viewers across all platforms, up 79% from Tokyo.
“if you look at it as a whole, approximately two-thirds of our viewership has come in prime time even though all the action happened live during the day,” Cordella noted. “And Peacock has been a huge part of that viewership. You’ve seen numbers in our press releases, on the competition days we’re regularly hitting 5 million streaming viewers. And they’re coming from everything for everything from live events to live shows, like Gold Zone and more.
So far Peacock has accumulated more than 5 billion streaming minutes during the Olympics.
“Clearly, the Olympics are back,” said Mark Lazarus, chairman, NBCU Media Group.
He noted that the success of the Olympics has created a halo effect for NBCU.
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“The rest of our company is also benefiting in a very big way,” Lazarus said. “The Today show, Nightly News, both broadcasting from here in Paris, have been ranked No. 1 each day, and they’re showing big advantages over their closest competitor.”
The executives said it was too early to tell if the Paris model would be deployed again when the Olympics come to Los Angeles in 2028.
“Every time you have an Olympics, you get a new time zone, a new puzzle, really, to put together,“ Solomon said. “And we’ve gone back in time to remind ourselves that in America, it doesn’t matter if they know the results. They want to know the stories of the athletes and how it played out.
“And so that’s why the primetime shows, I think, are resonating,” she said. “You can watch live in the afternoon if you’re a sports fan and want a quick hit of it. But when you come back in primetime, you get to see how it all happens.”
