High-profile sporting events behind NBC attracting 20 m fans in 2024
More than 20 million sports fans tuned in to a number of high-profile sporting events screened by NBC Sports last year, making 2024 the broadcaster’s most-watched year since 2016.
Driven by globally followed events such as the 2024 Paris Olympics and Paralympics, as well as games from the National Football League (NFL), England’s Premier League, and golf’s US Open, more than 400 billion minutes, or more than 7 billion hours, were consumed across NBCUniversal platforms, including on Peacock, the network’s streaming service.
NBC Sports delivered 32 sporting events in 2024 which topped 20 million viewers in Total Audience Delivery (TAD) across multiple platforms.
The highlight was NBCUniversal’s presentation of the 2024 Paris Olympics, which registered a TAD of 30.4 million viewers across the combined Paris Prime and primetime periods. This was up 80% from the Tokyo Olympics (16.9 million), according to official data from Nielsen and Adobe Analytics.
Other major viewership milestones recorded by NBC Sports in 2024 included the most-streamed live event in US history at the time of its broadcast. According to Nilsen, the 32.1 million viewers who tuned in to the Peacock Exclusive AFC Wild Card Game – an NFL event – made it the most-streamed live event in US history at the time, and drove the Internet to its largest US usage ever on a single day.
With England’s Premier League gaining increasing popularity in the US, NBC Sports’ coverage of the 2023/24 season also delivered the largest Premier League audience in US media history across NBC, Peacock and USA Network.
While broadcasters gear up for the challenge of attracting and retaining new eyeballs in 2025, it would appear that audiences worldwide will continue to be drawn to some of the biggest and most exciting sports events in the new year.
