Peacock Strikes Gold With Outsized Olympics, Super Bowl Audiences
Peacock is having a moment. NBCUniversal’s streaming platform is having its biggest week to date, fueled by some of the biggest sporting events on the planet in the Super Bowl and The Winter Olympics. The latter has already racked up its best streaming performance ever, with the majority of the 17-day event still to come….
Peacock is having a moment.
NBCUniversal’s streaming platform is having its biggest week to date, fueled by some of the biggest sporting events on the planet in the Super Bowl and The Winter Olympics. The latter has already racked up its best streaming performance ever, with the majority of the 17-day event still to come.
Through Wednesday, Peacock (and other NBCUniversal digital outlets) have amassed 6.3 billion minutes of viewing of the Milan Cortina Olympics. That’s more than the combined total for the previous two Winter Olympics in 2018 and 2022 — though Peacock did not yet exist in 2018, with streaming coming mostly through NBC apps. NBCU’s streaming numbers are already up more than 60 percent from the entirety of the 2022 games, a gap that will only grow over the final week-plus of these Olympics.
Peacock has dedicated live streams for every event in the competition during daytime hours in the U.S., plus its Gold Zone show that offers live looks to multiple sports at once. All that coverage has contributed significantly to a big overall jump in Winter Olympics viewing (including that on NBC, USA and CNBC) compared to four years ago. As of Wednesday, NBCUniversal is drawing 25.7 million viewers across its full suite of Olympics programming, double the 12.8 million average through the same time in 2022.
As for the Super Bowl, Nielsen reported the game averaged 124.93 million viewers — the second largest audience in U.S. TV history —with 121.63 million attributed to NBC and Peacock (Telemundo’s Spanish-language telecast had the other 3.3 million). Neither Nielsen nor NBCUniversal is offering a breakdown of how the audience shook out between NBC and Peacock, though clearly the vast majority of those viewers watched on the broadcast network.
Peacock’s number likely isn’t small, however: During the NFL’s regular season, Peacock contributed about 10.6 percent of Sunday Night Football’s total cross-platform audience (2.5 million of 23.5 million viewers). It’s not at all farfetched to put the streamer’s portion of the Super Bowl audience at 10 million or more viewers.
The big tune-ins come at an opportune time for Peacock, which grew its subscriber base in the fourth quarter of 2025 but also posted a wider loss than the same period in 2024. That was due in part to the streamer’s portion of NBCUniversal’s NBA rights package and a streaming-exclusive NFL game in late December.
The Olympics aren’t as pricey as the NFL or NBA.NBCUniversal’s current rights deal, signed in 2014 —years before Peacock was even on the drawing board — covers the 2022-32 games and is for $7.75 billion. Last year, NBCU inked a $3 billion extension for the 2034 and 2036 Olympics. That’s an average of about $1.34 billion for each of the eight Olympics in that time frame.
The current NFL deal, which includes Sunday Night Football, a couple of playoff games each season and the Super Bowl every four years, costs $2 billion annually. Peacock’s January 2024 playoff game — the first streaming exclusive postseason contest for the league — had a $110 million price tag.
