Warner Bros Discovery has been talking a good game about its Olympics coverage ambitions and the early signs are the work is paying off.
The entertainment giant, which holds the rights to the Olympic Games in Europe, has claimed stats showing the number of unique streaming viewers on its Max service after day two of competition in Paris exceeded the entire total of Tokyo 2020 Games, which were held in 2021 due to Covid-19, on its previous suite of streaming platforms.
Furthermore, WBD claims five times as many streaming viewers have watched the Games when compared with the same period in Tokyo, with Max credited with 80% of the total streaming audience. Max has been rolling out internationally over the past year, with a string of European launches tied to the Paris Olympics. In European territories such as the UK and Germany where Max is unavailable, Discovery+ is offering the coverage.
WBD didn’t break out figures, so it’s hard to quantify the stats accurately, but it did reveal that Paris 2024 had driven almost one billion streaming minutes — more than seven times higher than the same point at Tokyo and already representing 75% of that event’s total minutes. It also said a record had been set for subscriber acquisitions in a single day across Europe, though it didn’t provide a figure.
WBD predecessor Discovery claimed more than 175 million people watched the coverage through its digital and TV services. Paris marks the first Olympics WBD has reached as a unified Warner Bros-Discovery operation.
“The Paris 2024 Olympic Games are off to a fantastic start, and the recent rollout of Max in Europe is fueling record setting audiences and engagement,” said WBD Global Streaming and Games CEO and President J.B. Perrette.
“The powerful and unique combination of premium movies and scripted content, the best of real life entertainment, and many of the biggest events in international sports is bringing more people to Max and keeping them engaged for even longer. It’s still early days, so we’re excited to build further on this early success over the next two weeks.”
WBD also claimed linear network Eurosport was well up on Tokyo, by 98%. Again, numbers were not broken out but WBD said it reached the figure through tracking linear TV audiences in Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Sweden and the UK.
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