Marketing Profile: The Summer Olympic Games
The IOC and NBC are promising more streaming than ever in this quad
Finding the right adjective to describe the bigness of the Summer Olympic Games is a big job in itself. Let’s just agree that when 3 billion people consume 23 billion hours of programming, it’s BIG. It almost doesn’t matter that viewership is down from the 3.6 billion viewer peak at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. Big is big.
11,000 athletes competed in the Tokyo Olympics in 339 medal events held at 42 venues. Due to pandemic restrictions the attendance was unremarkable, but the Guinness Book of World Records still credits the ’96 games in Atlanta with the greatest in person attendance at 8.3 million tickets sold. An average of 500,000 attendees on site each day. In Paris ’24, 45,000 volunteers are expected along with 10,000 media people, and 6,000 paid staff. Big IS big.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) generated about $7.8 billion in revenues during the Tokyo quad, 60% from the sale of broadcast rights, and the rest mostly from sponsors. Even though viewership has been declining, the amount of revenue brought in for Tokyo broadcast rights and sponsorships grew 20% over Rio. 90% of the revenue is contributed back to the games and athlete development programs.
The Olympic Broadcasting Service, a 200 person operation based in Madrid, grew to 8,100 persons at the Tokyo games, operated 1,500 cameras and 3,600 microphones and produced over 10,000 hours of content. The resulting “world feed” was distributed by 45 broadcast partners worldwide. The Tokyo games were considered the first streaming video games, with a 74% increase in streaming viewership. Even with this large increase, 93% of all content was still distributed through conventional TV.
Ok, that is a lot of numbers. If you have started skimming, here is the recap you need to know. The Summer Olympics redefines BIG and live streaming is on the rise.
Outlook for Paris 2024
NBC still owns the US broadcast rights and announced yesterday they will be delivering more content through streaming than ever before. In addition to Peacock, their streaming service, they have NBCOlympics.com, where you can access content from the last Olympics, and see a schedule of events leading up to Paris.
This in itself is a giant leap forward. Finding content while Tokyo was live was difficult and it appears they are making steady efforts to fix that.
Fun Fact: Surfing became an Olympic event in Tokyo and in the Paris cycle, the surfing venue will be Tahiti. Now that is a remote location!
Links and Resources
IOC 2020 Marketing Report: IOC Marketing Report Tokyo 2020 (touchlines.com)
NBC Coverage announcement: https://olympics.nbcsports.com/2023/05/11/nbc-olympics-paris-2024-tv-stream-schedule/
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