The Olympics Dominates Streaming Ratings
(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.)
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Why did I make this change? Well, a lot of people regularly share every single issue of the streaming ratings report every time it hits their inbox. (Often ironically, the same people who work for streamers doing password-sharing crackdowns.) And this is a way to fight against that. I don’t mind if some subscribers share some of their favorite articles—in fact, I love it—it’s only a problem when certain people share every article every single time.
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Okay, on to the ratings. Overall, it was a down week for scripted shows and films—the top title was House of the Dragon with 21.9 million hours, which is low for the top title on the Nielsen charts, but great news for HBO—so we’ll start with the ratings champion for the week, the Olympics.
Some of the streamers avoided competing for gold with the Olympics ratings juggernaut, but not Netflix. They had a bunch of new shows including the UK’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, the second season of Unstable, and the return of Unsolved Mysteries...and one of those shows didn’t make the charts at all. Meanwhile, other streamers came out with new animated shows, including Prime Video (Batman: Caped Crusader, courtesy of Warner Bros.) and Hulu (Futurama). All that plus a fascinating case study in what ails Netflix’s animated films (is it IP, or a lack of theatrical release?), all the flops, bombs and misses, a look at how many new shows come to each streamer every month, and more.
Let’s dive in!
(Reminder: The streaming ratings report focuses on the U.S. market and compiles data from Nielsen’s weekly top ten viewership ranks, Luminate’s Top Ten Data, Showlabs, TV Time trend data, Samba TV household viewership, company datecdotes, and Netflix hours viewed data, Google Trends, and IMDb to determine the most popular content. While most data points are current, Nielsen’s data covers the weeks of July 29th to Aug 4th.)
The Olympics Comes for TV…And Streaming
Full disclosure: my family is an Olympics family. My wife, especially, has always loved the Olympics, and she got me hooked too, especially the obscure events. I’m really into handball, and I don’t know why that’s not a more popular sport in the US. Heck, I just rewatched Olympics sport climbing replays on Peacock last week. (That’s a fun bonus feature for Peacock I recommend more people check out. My only gripe? There is no “Decathlon” summary.)
I say all that to put my potential-bias cards on the table, but know this: the Olympics put up huge ratings.
I bring this up, because I want to clarify something. Even though this is a “streaming ratings” report...
The difference between streaming and linear television is much, much smaller than most pundits think.
Many analysts emphasize a distinction between linear television and streaming television—often asking “What works on streaming?”—that feels artificial to me. Yes, there are differences, and some genres haven’t worked as well on streaming (like sitcoms) as they did on broadcast, but even this is complicated since older sitcoms arguably powered streaming TV’s rise.
In the summer of 2024, there’s no question that “sports work on streaming”.1
Nowadays, we can’t think of “broadcast ratings” when it comes to sports, but “broadcast/cable plus streaming” numbers to understand their true reach. The Olympics averaged 30.6 million viewers in “prime time”, averaged over 17 days, or roughly 1,561 million hours across all of NBC’s platforms over those 17 days.
Here’s how that stacks up to past Olympics:
Some caveats. This “prime time” number includes some afternoon viewership. And it includes both streaming and linear viewership. And it includes cable viewership that aired simultaneously with broadcast. So it’s not “apples-to-apples” in a bunch of ways to past Olympics viewership numbers (particularly the last two Olympics), but in some ways, it’s more accurate, since it better captures all simultaneous Olympic’s viewership.
As I mentioned in the Ankler last week, a few factors went into the rise, in particular from 2021 Tokyo to this year in Paris. The timezone is a main factor, but Covid-19 depressed sports ratings in 2020 and 2021, plus more people work from home due to that disruption to take advantage of mid-day TV viewing.
Of course, this is still a “streaming ratings” report, and Peacock delivered a large chunk of that Olympics viewership. Specifically, as reported by THR, 392 million hours on Peacock and NBC’s other streaming platforms.
To wit, the Paris Olympics are not just one of the most popular streaming programs of the summer, but one of the most popular of all time. To show that, here’s the viewership of the top shows of the summer compared to the Olympics:
In other words, The Olympics on streaming were pretty clearly the “show of the summer”.
But that’s not it. The 2024 Summer Olympics are one of the top streaming shows of all time. Compared to all scripted, first run shows, it’d rank in the top ten. Here are those ratings, including the other ratings powerhouse, Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football:
So the Olympics were one of the biggest shows of all time on streaming. Do sports “work” on streaming? Yes, really, really well.
(Note: I left out two monster kid shows—Bluey and Cocomelon—and some acquired shows like Suits and Supernatural—above.)
But let’s get to the real question: monster numbers aside, was it worth it? NBCUniversal paid $2.5 billion for this year’s summer and 2022’s Winter Olympics. And I have to be honest:
Probably.
See, I expected the Olympics to cost NBC-Universal a fortune for such a limited run. And they do! But it’s “only” $2.5 billion for this year’s summer and 2022’s Winter Olympics. That is a lot a lot of money, truly. You could make ten Knives Out sequels on Netflix for that much money.
But in an age when top TV shows regularly cost more than $100 million—see The Acolyte just this year at $160 million—guaranteeing 30 million eyeballs across linear TV and streaming for something like $1.5 billion for 17 straight days probably pays off, especially considering the sponsorships and advertising that just don’t show up for streaming.