In each Olympic Games, CCTV's huge frontline team has proved the importance of China to the Olympic cause. In fact, there is such a United States media, which has not only served the Olympic Games through a thousand-person broadcast and reporting team for many years, but has also become the largest financier in the history of the Olympic Games.
But this media has encountered unprecedented challenges at the Paris Olympics.
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Text / Wang Shuai
Editor / Li Jiajun
Before the Paris Olympics, NBC, the United States's main broadcaster and who has not been absent from the Olympics since 1988, shouted what may be the most ambitious plan in the history of Olympic broadcasting: "All, everything! Every game, every ceremony, every report, every shot. In short, everything about the Olympics!"
As the schedule gets better, the good news keeps coming:
At the opening ceremony, NBC won 31.3 million viewers on all platforms, creating the second historical result since the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics with 40.7 million people, not only that, but the feat of sending reporters to the cruise ship of the United States delegation for real-time interviews also made the global media circle sigh "It has to be them";
NBC's live broadcast of "Cruise on a Cruise in United States" produced during the opening ceremony
The United States men's basketball dream team played Jokic-led Serbia for the first time in this Olympic Games, and NBC's ratings hit 10.9 million people in a single game, which is 1 million more than the men's basketball gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics;
The debut of another "national pride" United States women's football team took advantage of the soaring domestic women's football career in United States to deliver 4.2 million viewers - higher than the combined ratings of all football events in the Rio and Tokyo Olympics.
To put it simply, NBC's overall ratings soared by 79% over the same period of the Tokyo Olympics in three days last weekend, and it's no wonder that NBC boasted of a "triple explosion" in an all-letter headline on its official website.
NBC Sports published an article on the ratings related to the Paris Olympics
And NBC's sports president Rick · Cordella even wrote an open letter to employees: "All broadcasters under NBC are delivering great broadcasts to our huge audience, and the streaming platform Peacock has broken records."
Before we move on, we need to clarify a few concepts – NBC (NBC United States), one of the United States Big Three, is the world's longest-running and largest media platform for the Olympic Games, setting countless benchmarks for the entire sports television industry.
And the commercial entity behind it, NBCUniversal, is the one who actually paid for the rights to the Olympics.
In 2014, the NBCU bought the exclusive United States rights to all three Olympic Games and three Winter Olympics from 2021 to 2032 (excluding the Tokyo Olympics) with a new $7.75 billion contract. What is the concept of this number? Not even adding to the huge broadcast contracts that had been accumulated over the years, they alone would have become the biggest financiers of the Olympics in history – yes, no sponsor has contributed more than them.
NBC's role for the Olympics is unmatched Source: The Week NBC's role for the Olympics is unmatched Source: The Week
As for Peacock, it is actually NBCU's streaming client, which not only integrates all its traditional media programs, including NBC, but is also attracting users with more and more exclusive online content - the aforementioned NBC's Paris Olympics broadcast plan, more than 70% of the videos will be broadcast on Peacock.
Therefore, when we disenchant the unfamiliar term, what we present in front of us is actually a classic to some routine media transformation story: the king of the TV era, in the face of the surging tide of streaming media, in the case of not being fully prepared, gambled on his best resources to promote his own platform, hoping to catch up with the pace of the times.
So, can NBC do it?
Achievements, far from enough
In fact, the popularity of the ratings data of the Paris Olympics also has a bit of a bottoming out.
Since 2018, the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, Tokyo Olympics, Beijing Winter Olympics, and three consecutive "East Asian Time" Olympics have brought a long trough to the Olympic broadcast in United States, and the ratings have dropped again and again. Therefore, when the Olympics return to Europe, which is relatively friendly to the time difference and more culturally similar to the United States, the recovery of numbers can be expected.
In the face of the Paris Olympics, NBC has huge expectations
In the run-up to the Paris Olympics, NBC and Peacock recorded an average of 7.6 million viewers on both ends, the highest since 2016. Admittedly, the return of women's gymnastics ·superstar Simone Biles has created a gimmick, but United States fans' desire for the Olympics is real.
Reflected in the market, at the beginning of April this year, NBC also announced in a high-profile manner that the sales of advertising slots during the Paris Olympics have reached 1.2 billion US dollars, and with the continuous influx of orders, a new record for Olympic advertising revenue is just around the corner. Therefore, it is not difficult to understand why the dazzling data of the opening ceremony is worthy of an open letter written by Mr. President himself.
It seems that everything is gratifying. But NBC executives know that this is not enough, if not far enough.
The advertising revenue of $1.2 billion is of course exaggerated, but compared to the 7.75 billion broadcast contract, it is a small amount - even if each of the six Olympic events has an income level of 1.2 billion, it adds up to just the capital preservation; And due to the ratings fiasco of the Beijing Winter Olympics in the United States, NBC was actually already losing money at the time, so the revenue pressure for the remaining 5 will only be greater.
On the other hand, NBC's own streaming platform, Peacock, is also in an embarrassing situation in the media war in North America. As of the first quarter of this year, Peacock's paid subscriptions ranked only fifth in the United States, just over 33 million, a figure of only one-tenth of Netflix, and even Hulu, which is catching up with Disney's "second son" and ranking fourth, still has a gap of 20 million.
So when NBC announced that it was going to put 5,000 hours of the Games' total 7,000 hours on Peacock, you can imagine how much they were expecting.
The North American streaming war is suffocating Source: VOX
According to people close to NBC's top management, the group even put forward the goal of using the Paris Olympics to make Peacock more than 100 million subscribers. Triple the number of users in one Olympics? This is obviously not an easy task.
Just before the start of the Olympic Games, in order to announce Peacock's exclusive status of Olympic content, the former directly updated a version of the logo: the classic "Peacock" logo of the NBC department disappeared, and was replaced by the Olympic rings on the right side of the letter.
It's like saying, "Come in! Baby! Click in! We've got the Olympics here!"
Peacock更新的奥运版logo 图源：Jason Aten
The transformation is hard, but there is no room for failure
After decades of development, NBC, with the Olympic Games as the core copyright, has created its own "sports country" and has become the national sports station in the hearts of United States. From the NFL to the NBA, from the Premier League to golf, from the Tour de France to NASCAR, TV giants with a lot of high-quality sports resources in their hands thought that this would be their trump card in the new era.
That's what they thought and did — NBC specifically chose the week before the Tokyo 2020 Olympics as the auspicious day for Peacock to go live, and even if the Games were postponed, Peacock's release plan remained unchanged.
A year later, the Tokyo Olympics really came, but Peacock was greeted with a flood of bad reviews.
Stuck streams, confusing interfaces, incomplete projects, glitches...... Consumers wouldn't buy it, and the Los Angeles Times made Peacock even more poignant: "Finally, NBC has turned the Olympics into a nightmare."
NBC is still · hard to remember the lesson, and Mark Lazarus, the group's president, apologized to the media: "Frankly, we screwed up. We didn't deliver to our users what we promised."
At the Tokyo Olympics, the NBCU has invested a lot of resources as always, but the main event, Peacock, has been deflated
At this point, let's re-sort out the logic: the Tokyo Olympics are Peacock's unpreparedness, the Beijing Winter Olympics is the United States audience does not want to watch, so the Paris Olympics have become the "last chance", NBC and Peacock must bet everything.
And if you zoom in on the perspective, the plot is also not unfamiliar. For most enterprises, it may be a more reasonable choice to slow down and exchange time for space.
But alas, NBC doesn't have more time.
There was a report on the hot search, to the effect that the new generation of children no longer know how to turn on the TV. In fact, this is a common trend that video media around the world must face, and it is called "cord cutting" in the United States.
Two of the most direct data: in 2024, the proportion of subscriptions to pay TV channels in the United States has fallen to 41%, a full 50% lower than in 2010, which also means that more than half of United States no longer watch pay TV today; What's even more alarming is that, according to a Gallup poll, only 35% of adult viewers in United States are interested in watching the Paris Olympics this year, and "sports fans watching TV" is precisely the basic plate of NBC's sports business.
The shaking of the fundamentals is not difficult to detect. Beginning in Rio 2016, NBC's evening prime-time television ratings have experienced three consecutive Olympic dives, and by the end of the Beijing Winter Olympics, it had lost a total of 10.6 million viewers in just six years.
Although each edition has different reasons, it seems to be irreversible to sum up that "no one watches sports on TV anymore".
As a result, Paris became the first time in the history of NBC's Olympic broadcasts that it was not a TV station as its core position, "all in Peacock".
It's a gamble you can't afford to lose.
At the Paris Olympics, Peacock became the main battleground
Evolve or become extinct, NBC has no way back
The battle is treacherous, and all the NBCU has to do is to ensure that it can get out of this gamble of fate.
Peacock, which has experienced a "start-up collapse", is gradually turning the tide: although Peacock's net profit is still negative (a loss of 639 million in the first quarter of this year), the good news is that the loss has been narrowing, and its overall revenue even jumped 54% to $1.1 billion last year.
As for the money, Peacock does not have to worry about it for the time being, since NBC has decided to transform, the "ammunition supply" is naturally sufficient. In January of this year, the NBCU alone spent $110 million to buy the exclusive rights to the NFL playoff wild card game and handed it over to Peacock for broadcast, which also created the first NFL in history to be broadcast purely online.
According to the data, the "average number of viewers per minute" of the game reached 23 million, and the number of users who subscribed to watch the game in the first three days of the game alone exceeded 3 million. Eventually, 70% of those 3 million people became long-term subscribers to Peacock.
In contrast, in April and May of this year, Peacock, which lacks top-level content, lost 1 million paying subscribers.
The NFL broadcasts the first stream-exclusive playoff game in history
The drainage effect of sports has once again been proven, and it has also strengthened the confidence of the whole NBCU group in the Paris Olympic Games.
Fresh attempts emerge one after another: if inviting comedy stars Kevin ·Hart and Keenan · Thompson to host "Paris Olympics High Energy Highlights" in the form of a talk show is still the operation of old TV people, then it has reached cooperation with new media platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Overtime and Meta, and authorized a total of 27 Internet celebrities on the above platforms to become Olympic content creators as official broadcasters. This shows the resoluteness of NBC's transformation.
As the official broadcaster, NBC has invited influencers from a number of platforms to become Olympic content creators
At the same time, NBC is equally bold in the application of AI technology.
They let artificial intelligence deeply learn the voice of 79-year-old Al ·Michaels, a decorated sports commentator, and generated a full 7 million corpus — yes, Peacock's "Paris Olympics Daily Broadcast" is all voiced by AI.
But the most "anti-common sense" way to play is how to make money.
As the creator of cramming live streams with ads, NBC certainly knows how annoying viewers are with ads. So they did the opposite, picking out an hour of "ad-free time" at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, which was sponsored by six of NBC's biggest patrons — and they agreed to do so in return for the fact that within that hour, the logos of the six brands would scroll through the corner of the screen, telling the audience who paid for their enjoyment.
Platform innovation, content innovation, business innovation...... At the Paris Olympics, where there is no way back, NBC is running with Peacock.
"Ad-free Exclusive Period" at the Opening Ceremony
In fact, the industry has long had a hunch that the Paris Olympics will be a transformative moment to reshape the sports media ecosystem.
The horror of the media industry is that when the wind changes dramatically, disruption and destruction can also be at the snap of a finger, whether it's a veteran player or a spoiler riding the wind. This truth is as strong as NBC will not understand.
As the biggest financier in the history of the Olympic Games, and even the existence of the self-proclaimed "half of the creator" of the Olympic Games, NBC's every move is bound to affect the future of the entire Olympic movement.
The root cause of the disappearance of the dinosaurs was not that an asteroid hit the Earth, but that they could not adapt to the new environment. So for NBC, it's either evolution or extinction, and there is no longer a third option on the path to future development.
※ The cover image of the article is from USA Today, and the picture is not otherwise marked in the article as coming from NBCU