NBCUniversal’s takeaways from the Paris Olympics

The Future. The Paris Olympics was the best guinea pig NBCUniversal could’ve asked for in the run-up to the Los Angeles Games, giving the Olympics broadcasters ample data on what audiences loved about the revamped coverage of the Games. Considering the love for this year’s entertainment and celebrity factors, don’t be surprised if NBCU taps Universal Pictures’ bench of filmmakers to craft cinematic content around the Games and competing athletes.

Games debrief
Mark Lazarus, chairman of NBCUniversal, said, “The Olympics are our billion-dollar lab.”

And the company now has a lot of data.

• The Paris Games were a massive hit, scoring over 30 million viewers every day (per data from both Nielsen and Adobe Analytics) and notching 75% higher ratings than the Tokyo Games in 2021.
• Those numbers demonstrated that covering events live didn’t really affect primetime viewership — audiences got a different taste by watching both or by playing catch-up on Peacock’s Gold Zone show.
• That’s because it wasn’t just about the results of the events — people wanted to hear the commentary, get sucked into the narratives of the athletes, and be entertained by on-air personalities.
• Celebrities ended up playing a large part in that — Snoop Dogg was consistently going viral, NBC’s A-list ambassadors were popular, and just seeing who was in the stands was fun.

Here’s an interesting tidbit: Amy Rosenfeld, the SVP of Olympic production at NBC Sports, told THR, “I’ve had more people say, I don’t really watch the Olympics, but I’m watching this, and I really do wonder if this is the evolution of where sports productions go.”

In other words, there will always be die-hard sports fans, but more and more people are just looking for great water-cooler entertainment.