The 2026 Winter Olympics are looking like a much bigger TV draw than the 2022 games.
Friday’s opening ceremony and the first full day of competition on Saturday drew big audiences for NBCUniversal (with a little help from a couple of its former cable channels). Based on preliminary Nielsen ratings and streaming data from Adobe Analytics, viewership is up by more than 60 percent compared to the same two days of the 2022 Winter Olympics — which scored all-time lows for the winter games. Huge growth in streaming on Peacock and less pronounced time zone differences between the host cities (Milan and Cortina, Italy) and the United States likely played roles in the ratings gains.
The opening ceremony on Feb. 6 averaged 21.4 million viewers across NBC and Peacock, inclusive of both the live daytime telecast and a primetime replay. That’s up 34 percent from the 2022 opening ceremony in Beijing, China (15.9 million viewers). Peacock averaged 3 million viewers, a streaming high for a Winter Olympics opening ceremony (though the platform has only been around for the past two winter games; prior to that, live streaming required authentication through a cable or satellite service).
On Saturday, the audience jumped to a combined 28.5 million for live events in the afternoon — on NBC, Peacock and former NBCU/now Versant cable channels USA Network and CNBC — and NBC’s primetime show, nearly doubling the 14.8 million viewers for the first Saturday of the 2022 games. The audience was the largest for any Winter Olympics day in the United States since midway through the 2014 games, a span of 43 Winter Olympics shows.
Peacock had an average of 4.1 million viewers on Saturday, and audiences streamed 1.3 billion minutes of Olympics coverage for the day. That alone is almost a third of the way to the total for the entire 2022 Olympics (4.3 billion minutes).
NBCUniversal is running a similar game plan to the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, which also saw big ratings gains. Peacock has live streams for every event and the Gold Zone whip-around show that often looks in on multiple sports at once. NBC, CNBC and USA offer live daytime telecasts, and NBC’s primetime show presents extended (albeit delayed) coverage of the day’s biggest events.
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