• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, August 15, 2024

Nearly 60 million U.S households (59.4 million) watched some part of the 17-day Paris Olympics either on linear TV or streaming platforms, according to Samba TV data.

This was an 11% increase from the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics, and a 25% increase from the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics.

Throughout the entire two-week period, at least 600,000 new households viewed some of the Olympics each day on average -- for every succeeding day of the entire two-week event -- and in 12 of the 17 days, more than 1 million new households tuned in.

By the fourth day of the games, 69% of households that would ultimately watch the games had already done so.

By the seventh day, that percentage increased to 80%, and by the twelfth day, 96% of Olympics viewers had already tuned in to the games.

Household viewership was highest on the third day of the Olympics -- with 27.8M U.S. households. That was the first day the U.S. women’s gymnastics team competed.

The second-highest household viewing day was the tenth day, at 25.7 million -- another day that featured heavy coverage of women’s gymnastics.

NBCUniversal says the entire Paris games on Saturday averaged 31.3  million viewers across NBC, Peacock and other NBCU platforms/networks -- up 82% from Tokyo Olympics in 2021, at 17.2 million, according to Nielsen and Adobe Analytics.