International Olympics Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach predicted record-breaking broadcast and social media figures for the 2024 Paris Olympics as they entered their second week on Saturday.
Bach told a daily brief in Paris that by the end of the games, running from July 25 to August 11, half the world’s eight billion population will have tuned into the 2024 edition or connected with it on social networks.
“The broadcast and digital figures are going through the roof,” he said.
Referring to early data, he cited an 83.3% audience share in France for the opening ceremony on July 26.
“In the U.S., the NBC streaming platform Peacock has already topped the total of Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022 combined after just three days of the games,” he said.
Per the latest viewing figures on Friday from NCUInternational, which holds U.S. rights, it has a posted six-day Total Audience Delivery average of 33.0 million viewers across the combined live Paris Prime (2-5 p.m. ET) and U.S. primetime (8-11 p.m. ET/PT) time periods, up 76% from Tokyo (18.8 million).
“Warner Brothers Discovery, the rights holder for Europe, exceeded the total unique streaming viewers for Tokyo in just the first two days of the games,” added Bach.
Bach also that in less than a week of the games, 82.7% of the total Japanese audience had tuned in. Japanese rights are held by a consortium of broadcasters including NHK and other commercial networks.
The IOC president said traffic on the games’ official social media handles was also up.
“More than 8.5 billion engagements have been accounted to date, already 40% more than during the entire Tokyo 2020 period,” he said.
“We can say with a great confidence. We’re on track for more than half of the entire world’s population to follow the Olympic Games, Paris 2024.”
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