NBCUniversal’s streaming platform Peacock brought in 2.8 million subscribers after the first six days of its coverage of the recent 2024 Paris Olympic Games.
This becomes the second-highest subscriber pull for the platform of the year, falling just behind its exclusive broadcast of last January’s NFL AFC Wild Card game of 3 million that broke various streaming records.
This is according to research company Antenna, who reveals that Peacock brought in just under 400,000 new customers per day for the Olympics, from 25-31 July. This is five times higher than any other new customers pulled in the previous eight weeks.
The research company believes that new subscribers to Peacock accounted for almost one-third of all streaming subscriptions in the US for the entirety of the month of July.
The 2024 Paris Olympics proved to be a significant event in regards to online streaming, with many of its broadcast partners, including NBCUniversal, offering their own streaming platforms.
Antenna finds that of the 23.5 billion minutes streamed during the Games, a majority of those minutes were viewed on Peacock. NBCUniversal states that the streaming figure grew 40% from the previous Games in Tokyo in 2021 and the Winter Olympics in 2022 combined.
It remains to be seen whether NBCUniversal can retain those 2.8 million new subscribers in the remaining months ahead. After its exclusive NFL AFC Wild Card game in January, Peacock reported up to 500,000 unsubscribed following the game.
The same problem could arise as NBCUniversal was the exclusive US broadcaster of the Olympic Games this summer, but the media conglomerate will hope to market its range of sports content it has on offer from September onwards to retain those subscribers.
In a highly competitive US broadcast market, compounded by the arrival of direct-to-consumer streaming platforms, there appears to be a battle from the likes of Disney, NBC, Warner Bros Discovery, Amazon Prime Video and more on not only attaining broadcast rights fees for sports leagues, but also garnering a larger share of the US sports fan’s subscription.
