• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, March 22, 2024

More TV sports on your smart TV screen at the same time for the Paris Olympics?

Sure, keep them coming -- especially when you are covering all 329 medal events -- so much so that NBCUniversal's new feature “Discovery Multiview” will allow viewers to track up to 40 live events simultaneously.

In addition, viewers will be offered the ability to see four competitions on the same screen.

And on Peacock, streamers can move the frames around on their screen -- say soccer, track and field, gymnastics, and wrestling -- and select which ones they want to listen to.

So viewers can play technical director in their own home. 

Should we ask whether one needs to measure each of those events with an individual viewership number?

The positive, of course, is potentially higher engagement on average for all Olympic content. That's because Olympic TV-video advertisers -- as they are in many other TV advertising deals -- are also buying "audience."

But what if viewers are lazy -- or having trouble about where their eyes should focus? Should we ask whether Bayer Aspirin or Johnson & Johnson's Tylenol will be co-sponsors to soothe the potentially headache-inducing process?

What will hopefully result is a smooth experience for loyal Olympic viewers -- which was not the case for the pandemic-impacted “2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics” (which actually took place in 2021).

At that time, there were complaints about the rough screen-to-screen navigation of different sport, which came during Peacock's early days on the streaming scene -- probably also affected by a stronger push to keep most of Olympic content on NBCU’s linear TV networks to shore up and back loyal TV advertisers already nervous about eroding linear TV network viewing.

Hopefully things are smoother now. And if viewers don’t want to bother with all that shifting of sports competition frames on their smart TV sets, they can just watch in the old-school way -- have  NBCU-own control-room directors move around to different sports action.

But wait -- there's more. Viewers can purchase food and beverages straight through the Peacock streaming app before or during events and have them delivered to their homes, through ‘Virtual Concessions.’

So if your eyes are tired of quickly moving from sport to sport for hours at a time, guessing you can also add a couple of bottles of Visine or Systane to your Papa John's Pizza or Taco Bell order.