STAMFORD, Conn.—NBC Sports said 2024 was its best year in terms of ratings since 2016. Its success was fueled by the Paris Summer Olympics as well as its NFL coverage, both on Peacock and broadcast.
Collectively, these events, among others, gave NBC Sports its most-watched year since 2016, with more than 400 billion minutes (or more than 7 billion hours) consumed across NBCUniversal platforms.
NBC Sports delivered 32 shows in 2024 which topped 20 million viewers in Total Audience Delivery (TAD) across multiple platforms. Over the more than 7,000 hours of coverage it provided for its marquee event, the Summer Games in Paris, NBCU registered a TAD of 30.4 million viewers across the combined live Paris Prime (2-5 p.m. ET) and U.S. primetime (8-11 p.m. ET/PT) periods—up 80% from the Tokyo Summer Olympics (16.9 million), according to official data from Nielsen and Adobe Analytics.
The NBC broadcast network extended its streak to 152 consecutive Summer Olympics nights as primetime’s No. 1 show. Led by Peacock, 23.5 billion minutes of Paris Olympics coverage were streamed—up 40% from all prior Summer and Winter Olympics combined (16.8 billion minutes across NBCUniversal digital platforms).
NBC also used its NFL coverage to boost its broadcast ratings and also to juice its Peacock streaming subscriber base. Although it drew negative reactions at the time, Peacock’s exclusive AFC wild-card game on Jan. 14 became the most-streamed live event in U.S. history at the time, with 32.1 million total viewers tuning in to watch the Kansas City Chiefs defeat the Miami Dolphins, according to Nielsen. That record was surpassed later in the year by the 74 million who livestreamed the Nov. 15 Mike Tyson-Jake Paul fight on Netflix.
The network’s “Sunday Night Football” finished the 2023-2024 TV season as primetime’s No. 1 TV show in all key metrics for the 13th consecutive year.
Other sports standouts included the 16.7 million viewers who tuned into the Kentucky Derby on May 4, the largest audience for the Triple Crown horse race since 1989. In soccer, NBC Sports’ presentation of the English Premier League’s first match week of the 2024-25 season was the most-watched opening weekend on record in the United States, NBC Sports said. It averaged 820,000 viewers across six matches live on NBC/Peacock, USA Network, and NBC Sports Digital platforms from Friday, Aug. 16-Sunday, Aug. 18.
