Olympics
IOC predicts record-breaking global viewership for Paris Olympics
IOC President Thomas Bach forecasts unprecedented broadcast and social media engagement for the 2024 Paris Olympics, with expectations of reaching half of the world's population.
IOC President Thomas Bach has predicted record-breaking broadcast and social media figures for the 2024 Paris Olympics as they began their second week on Saturday.
He highlighted the unprecedented global engagement anticipated by the end of the games, scheduled from July 25 to August 11, estimating that half of the world’s eight billion population would either tune in or connect via social networks.
Bach pointed out that the broadcast and digital numbers were skyrocketing. Early data showed an 83.3% audience share in France for the opening ceremony on July 26, illustrating the widespread interest in the event.
In the United States, NBC’s streaming platform Peacock had already exceeded the total viewership of both Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022 combined within just three days of the current games.
According to NCUInternational, which holds the U.S. broadcasting rights, the six-day Total Audience Delivery averaged 33.0 million viewers across both live Paris Prime (2-5 p.m. ET) and U.S. primetime (8-11 p.m. ET/PT) time slots, marking a 76% increase from Tokyo’s 18.8 million. Similarly, Warner Brothers Discovery, the European rights holder, reported surpassing the total unique streaming viewers for Tokyo within the first two days of the games.
In Japan, a consortium of broadcasters, including NHK and other commercial networks, reported that 82.7% of the total Japanese audience had tuned in within the first week of the games. Additionally, social media engagement for the Olympics has soared, with more than 8.5 billion interactions recorded so far, representing a 40% increase over the entire Tokyo 2020 period.
Bach confidently stated that these figures indicate that more than half of the global population is expected to follow the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.