NBC’s Olympics Broadcast Isn’t Just Addictive. It’s a New Era of Streaming
I start every morning of the Summer Games the same way: by turning on the living room TV, saying the word “Olympics” into a Comcast-powered remote control, and clicking the Gold Zone icon. It’s like putting my TV set on autopilot. For the rest of the day Comcast’s NBCUniversal is in charge, showing skateboarding or swimming one minute, fencing or field hockey the next—and sometimes 10 sports in 10 boxes simultaneously. I call my kids over to the TV when Team USA is about to win a medal. I mute it for long stretches of the day. It’s like having a live portal to Paris, or at least a very sophisticated screensaver.
You may experience the Olympics in a totally different fashion. Maybe you swipe through videoclips on TikTok. Maybe you stream the raw feeds of your favorite obscure sport on Peacock. Maybe you watch NBC’s whiz-bang prime time recap. Maybe you tune into some highlight show I haven’t even discovered yet. Ultimately, we’re all still watching the same global spectacle, albeit from different angles and with different narrators.
It’s a rare instance of fragmentation being to streaming’s benefit; the Olympics illustrate how all the shattered pieces can be stuck back together. “These days, it’s not often that we can unite people and bring them together around something,” says Molly Solomon, executive producer and president of NBC Olympics Production. “The Olympics is doing it.”
Randy Plemel, the founder of a design consultancy in Queens, New York, felt this effect when his family wanted to watch the US Women’s National Team soccer match and gymnastics superstar Simone Biles at the same time last week. His solution: Multiview, a Peacock feature that splits the big screen between multiple events, “thus keeping a harmonious home,” he says.
That approach has also helped Plemel expose his children to obscure competitions they would never ordinarily see. (My own kids are suddenly into Ping Pong and canoe slalom.) Other viewers are observing the games through Snoop Dogg’s eyes, since the rapper is there on assignment for NBC, or streaming the soccer watch parties hosted by Alex Cooper, or catching up via Kevin Hart and Kenan Thompson’s Olympic Highlights comedy show on Peacock. When Solomon mentioned the comic relief to me, I had to Google it; I didn’t even know it existed. But in a way, that’s the point. “We think we have an answer for every type of viewing a consumer wants,” Peacock president Kelly Campbell told me.
Some of the viewing types were science fiction back in 2014 when NBCUniversal, the media company owned by Comcast, agreed to pay $7.75 billion for the American rights to all Olympics telecasts between Beijing in 2022 and Brisbane in 2032. Comcast chair Brian Roberts pointed out on CNBC last week that Olympics TV deals “let you have all technologies,” meaning NBC can distribute Olympics content in ways that didn’t exist a decade ago. That’s how you get Peacock’s daily recap videos narrated by an AI-generated version of legendary broadcaster Al Michaels, as well as dozens of daily @NBCOlympics clips on TikTok, a platform that wasn’t invented until 2016. The highlight reels are yet another entry point into Olympics programming.
NBC’s have-it-your-way approach was borne out of technological necessity. Millions of viewers still like to wake up to the Today show’s teary-eyed interviews with gold medalists and fall asleep to the prime time team’s heartfelt come-from-behind stories. But that traditional production—gauzy, promotional, and packed with commercials—doesn’t appeal to everyone, particularly in an age of instantaneous push alerts and social media memes about the games. So for the first time, NBCUniversal decided to stop gatekeeping the hottest events of the day until US prime time. Biles’ gold medal feats have been shown live during the day and again at night. “No holding back” is how Solomon describes it. “We are here for the audience.”
This has already redounded to NBC’s and the International Olympic Committee’s benefit. Summer Olympics fever is real: NBC’s TV ratings and streaming stats are both through the roof. Eight of Peacock’s 10 most-streamed days of all time have been from these Olympics. It’s been a complete turnaround for the streaming service, which disappointed users with a meager selection of streams during the Covid-delayed Tokyo games in 2021.
This time around, it just works. Livestreams load quickly. On-demand clips seamlessly play, one after another. NBC has managed to avoid what every streaming distributor dreads: Headlines about server meltdowns and software glitches. “We try to make livestreaming look easy, but actually it’s not,” Patrick Miceli, Peacock’s chief technology officer, told me. His team is handling up to 60 simultaneous live events, for a grand total of about 1,800 during the first week alone. “This year is quite an inflection point,” he says, “in terms of what a streaming platform with live sports can do.”
Peacock’s exclusive livestream of an NFL playoff game in January ranked as the most live-streamed game in history, giving Miceli’s team a boost of confidence that the service could hold up under the strain. But the Summer Games are a unique beast. Hundreds of thousands of worker hours went into the engineering, product design, and marketing of the Olympics experience on Peacock, Campbell says.
“For the first time, I really feel like we’ve solved the conundrum of navigation,” she says. “The audience is always like, ‘I’m overwhelmed by the Summer Olympics. I can’t find what I’m looking for.’ I do think the interface and the dashboard of Peacock has really solved that.”
DJ Jenkins, a pastor in Los Angeles, agrees. He credits the Multiview functionality and Gold Zone—NBC’s addictive way of one-upping the popular NFL RedZone format—with keeping him engaged in the games. His Threads account is full of insta-reactions to the live events: “LET’S GO SIMONE YOU ARE THE GOAT!!!” “Absolutely electric race and finish. Wow! NOAH!”
The interactions go both ways. According to NBC internal research shared with WIRED, nearly a third of new Olympics viewers say that clips on social media are driving them to tune in. The company’s sports social media channels picked up a combined 2 million new followers in the first week of the games.
Peacock’s editorial team has adjusted and reorganized video content on the fly. Viewers and reviewers have been buzzing about Snoop Dogg’s segments, so the team set up a scrollable playlist of Snoop clips. Users have been looking for videos of the medal ceremonies, so now there’s a collection of those too.
Some of the new formats are fundamentally different ways to “watch TV.” With Multiview, for instance, the Olympics wash over you—less like a show, more like a state of being. Campbell says about half of Multiview users click into a specific sport, so they’re using the split screen as a “discovery tool,” while the other half stay in the control-room-style experience.
Control is the operative word; we’re all growing increasingly comfortable with multiple screens and data sources in our faces at all times. YouTube TV, which has been offering a make-your-own multiview function since last year, has been promoting preset Olympics versions this summer. DirecTV has its own version. People are growing more accustomed to “using more than one screen at one time,” Campbell says.
NBC has around 20 actual control rooms operating at any given time between Paris, New York, and NBC Sports headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut. For Gold Zone, a feast for the eyes, producers in Stamford pick 16 live feeds to monitor at a time, then the directors whip around from event to event, hoping to catch every medal contest.
Gold Zone usage more than doubled in the first few days of the games, Campbell says. Multiview has also been used by millions of subscribers. Of course, fans always want more: On Sunday a woman tweeted to @Peacock, asking about the LA Olympics in 2028: “Can we make a custom multiview where you can choose the four things you watch?” (NBC won’t commit to that, but I bet it is in the works already.)
As I spoke with Solomon, I realized that I had not watched a single minute of NBC’s traditional prime time TV coverage. And she’s OK with that! I asked her to define success in 2024 from NBC’s perspective: “Success is the audience engaging with the Olympics on social, on television platforms, streaming on Peacock,” she said. “And that’s why we’ve given them all different flavors of the Olympics. Find what satisfies you, and as long as you’re with us in some form on some platform, it’s a success.”
Because NBC has your attention and thus so do the company’s advertisers. The medium previously known as television is becoming more and more like a never-ending Instagram scroll. But some moments (like Team USA’s dominance in Paris) are still big enough to capture almost everyone’s fragmented attention. “In the end,” Solomon says, “we’re all watching the same team.”
