NBCUniversal is living la dolce vita with its coverage of the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. The broadcast of Friday’s opening ceremony scored a record audience for the media company.
The opening ceremony presentation averaged 21.4 million viewers on NBC and Peacock, according to preliminary Nielsen data and digital Adobe Analytics data cited in an NBCUniversal press release.
That audience isn’t just up 34% from the 15.9 million viewers who watched the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics’ opening ceremony; it also marks the biggest streaming viewership for any Winter Olympic Games, NBCUniversal says.
The company touted that Olympics viewing on Peacock and its other streaming platforms exceeded 700 million minutes through Friday, 2.5 times more than the streaming consumption of the 2022 Olympics in a comparable time frame.
“We are off to a strong start with Friday’s captivating opening ceremony highlighted by the historic cities, the scenic mountain areas, and the parade of athletes,” NBC Sports President Rick Cordella said. “The opening ceremony audience exceeded our expectations, and we can’t wait for the next two weeks of competition.”
NBC will likely get big Olympics viewership tonight, too, as the network will follow its coverage of Super Bowl LX with its Primetime in Milan program at approximately 10:45 p.m. ET on NBC and Peacock. NBC Sports’ Mike Tirico is both calling the Super Bowl game at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clarita, California, and hosting Primetime in Milan from the same stadium immediately afterward, becoming the first U.S. broadcaster to call the Super Bowl and host a Winter Games in the same year.
Tirico and his NBC Sports colleagues will have a lot of ground to cover tonight — between the women’s downhill event, during which multiple competitors crashed on the slope, and the team figure skating event, as Team USA seeks to defend its 2022 gold medal.
The Olympics is a big feather in the NBCUniversal cap: The company owns the U.S. media rights to the Olympic Games for another decade yet, meaning we’ll see coverage of Los Angeles 2028, French Alps 2030, Brisbane 2032, Utah 2034, and the 2036 Summer Games on NBCU’s channels and platforms.
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