The Paris Olympics was the best guinea pig NBCUniversal could’ve asked for in the run-up to the Los Angeles Games.
The Paris Games gave America's Olympics broadcasters mountains of data on what audiences loved about the revamped coverage, and four years to decide what to do with it.
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.
Mark Lazarus, chairman of NBCUniversal, said, “The Olympics are our billion-dollar lab.”
And the company now has a lot of data, such as:
The Paris Games were a massive hit, scoring over 30 million USA viewers every day (per data from both Nielsen and Adobe Analytics) and notching 75 percent 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. 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, commented: “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.
It remains to be seen whether the broadcasters try to persuade the organisers to host the opening ceremony out to sea or on the Los Angeles River.