International Olympic Games President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Thomas Bach predicted record streaming and social media numbers for the Paris 2024 Olympics as they entered their second week on Saturday.
Bach told a daily news conference in Paris that by the end of the Games, which run from July 25 to August 11, half of the world’s eight billion people will have tuned in to the 2024 edition or connected with it on social media.
“Streaming and digital numbers are skyrocketing,” he said.
Referring to early figures, he cited an 83.3% audience share in France for the opening ceremony on July 26.
“In the United States, NBC’s streaming platform, Peacock, has already surpassed the total for Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022 combined after just three days of the games,” he said.
According to the latest Friday viewing figures from NCUInternational, which holds the U.S. rights, it has a six-day average published total audience delivery of 33.0 million viewers across the combined Paris primetime (2-5 p.m. ET) and U.S. primetime (8-11 p.m. ET/PT) periods, up 76% from Tokyo (18.8 million).
“Warner Brothers Discovery, the rights holder for Europe, surpassed the total number of unique streaming viewers for Tokyo in the first two days of the games alone,” Bach added.
Bach also noted that less than a week before the Games, 82.7 percent of the total Japanese audience had tuned in to the games. Japanese rights are held by a broadcasting consortium that includes NHK and other commercial networks.
The IOC president said traffic on the Games’ official social media channels also increased.
“More than 8.5 billion pledges have been made so far, 40% more than during the entire Tokyo 2020 period,” he said.
“We can say with great confidence that we are on track to have more than half of the world’s population watching the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.”