Peacock is the real winner at the Paris Olympics

The Summer Olympics in Paris have brought medals to superstars like Simone Biles and new fan favorites like Korean shooter Kim Ye-ji, but one of the biggest winners may be NBCUniversal’s streaming service Peacock.

While the company hasn’t released new subscription or download numbers, Peacock’s app has consistently sat atop Apple App Store rankings since the Olympics began, and the streaming service declared the first four days of the Olympics its best-ever four-day stretch. Within just a few days, total minutes streamed had already surpassed the combined viewership of the entire 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo and 2022 Winter Games in Beijing, and Peacock has reported strong engagement with new features like its “Gold Zone” multi-event show and even customized, AI-generated recaps featuring the simulated voice of sportscaster Al Michaels.

“We’re off to an incredible start,” says Peacock President Kelly Campbell. “It’s really showing not only what’s possible with the Olympics on Peacock, but what’s possible when it comes to streaming live sports.”

Peacock’s 2024 coverage have no doubt benefited from audiences increasingly accustomed to streaming, Paris’s time zone aligning better with U.S. viewing than the recent Games in Asia, and fans eager for a return to summer normalcy after the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Olympics. But the streaming service has also won praise from viewers and reviewers for technical and design achievements that let fans quickly find the events and recaps they want through an in-app hub, whether they’re on a mobile device or a smart TV. Peacock has also enabled viewers to easily switch between a new “multiview” feature showing multiple events at once and individual event streams. It’s a big change from the days when Olympic viewers’ options for what events to watch were limited simply by the nature of linear TV broadcasts or when big event streams were often marred by mediocre apps and technical glitches. 

“We’re running about 300 live events a day and if you think about that, in a streaming platform, it’s really unprecedented,” says Campbell. “And with 300 events, many of those are at the same time, so we’re running up to about 40 events at the same time on any given day.”

Of course, one question is whether Peacock viewers will stick with the service after the Olympics are over, or follow the recent trend of streaming fans canceling monthly plans as soon as they’ve seen the content they signed up for. Peacock has at times struggled to build a consistent audience—and the streamer, like several others in the industry, is yet to turn a profit—but it’s increasingly found success through live sports, including an exclusive NFL wild card match in January that set records for viewership and internet traffic.

“I think they have every reason to be optimistic that they’ll get to keep a lot of the customers who are sampling Peacock to watch the Olympics,” says analyst Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson. “The coverage has drawn raves. The way that they’ve made events available is clean and simple and appealing, and they learned from the Chiefs-Dolphins that the vast majority of customers that they added stuck around.”

Campbell says the company continues to monitor and adjust to what viewers find appealing, including adding a collection of top Snoop Dogg clips after the rapper’s commentary and appearances went viral on social media. The AI Al Michaels recaps have also drawn hundreds of thousands of users to sign up for their own customized feeds through the feature, and nearly a quarter of Olympic viewers are taking advantage of the multiview feed, she says.

It’s likely that some features of the Olympic streams will appear in other Peacock sports coverage. “We certainly intend to leverage multiview for other sports in the future,” Campbell says, and NBC Sports President Rick Cordella said Thursday the feature is likely to appear in Premier League broadcasts. It’s still “early days” in terms of where generative AI might pop up again, Campbell says. But it seems likely the success of “AI Al” will mean viewers will see more at least partially machine-generated sports coverage in the future.

In the meantime, Peacock is looking forward to an NFL opening weekend game it’s streaming from Brazil in September, and the streamer is soon debuting other programming that might appeal to sports fans looking for a post-Olympic watch, including a mockumentary series featuring NBA star Steph Curry and a period drama focused on an infamous heist following Muhammad Ali’s 1970 comeback match.

“An important part of this is about serving the right content to consumers on the heels of the Olympics,” Campbell says.

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