Along with rising interest in virtually all live TV sports content, recent research has shown the number of global sports TV documentaries is at its highest levels in four years.

A lot of this came in the lead-up to the Paris Olympics. 

Ampere Analysis says there was a 25% share --103 sports documentaries and docuseries -- of all documentaries released between May and July 2024. That is a record share level.  

Looking at July only, sports documentary content hit a record 17% share of all new unscripted commissions released.

Overall first-run sports documentary programming has grown to 12% share so far in 2024 -- up from 6% in 2020 and 9% in 2022.

Previously, in 2022, there were 109 sports documentaries in the three months preceding November 2022 in anticipation of the 2022 FIFA Football World Cup. Ampere notes there were more overall documentaries of all types being started at that time.

Perhaps to bolster its legacy TV platforms, traditional TV network owners have played a major part in this rise. 

“Unusually, public broadcasters created more of this material than the global streamers,” writes Cyrine Amor, senior analyst at Ampere Analysis. 

“This year there’s been a huge increase in the number of sports documentaries, docuseries, reality, and entertainment programming.... a record month for global releases.”

In the U.S., the entire 16-day Paris Olympics event averaged 30.6 million viewers across NBC Television Network, Peacock and other NBCU platforms and networks -- up 82% from Tokyo Olympics in 2021 (16.9 million) -- according to fast national data from Nielsen and Adobe Analytics.

NBCU says 23.5 billion minutes of Paris Olympics coverage were streamed -- up 40% from all prior Summer and Winter Olympics combined.