Beijing Winter Olympics Opening Day Viewership 43% Lower Than in 2018

A spokesman for NBC parent NBCUniversal, a unit of Comcast Corp. CMCSA -0.62% , said nearly 15 million of those viewers watched the opening ceremony. The opening day featured other events beyond the opening ceremony, including the mixed curling round robin and figure skating mixed-team qualification rounds.

One of the notable moments of the opening ceremony was the choice of Dinigeer Yilamujiang, a 20-year-old female cross-country skier from China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang, as one of the country’s two athletes to light the Olympic flame. Her selection came as a reminder to the geopolitical issues looming over the Olympics.

The U.S. and other countries, including Australia, Canada, the U.K., and Japan have decided not to send official delegations of dignitaries. The countries have cited human-right abuses in China as their reasoning, which includes a yearslong campaign of forcible assimilation that has included the detention of as many as one million mostly Muslin minorities in internment camps in Xinjiang.

Viewership for Olympic opening ceremonies has been falling. The kickoff for the Tokyo Summer Olympics in July attracted roughly 17 million U.S. viewers. That had been a roughly 36% drop from the Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro in 2016.

While opening ceremony viewership may not necessarily reflect the audience of the entire Games, the Olympics have garnered smaller audiences in recent cycles. The Tokyo Olympics drew the lowest audience for the Summer Games since NBC started broadcasting them in 1988. NBC had said it expected a drop in viewership because of the challenges posed by the pandemic, as some athletes were unable to participate and spectators weren’t allowed in the stands.

The Beijing Olympics will have few spectators, and due to China’s strict Covid-testing regime, NBC decided to keep its announcing team in its U.S. facilities. 

“We said Tokyo was going to be one of the most challenging Olympics of our lifetime. I retract that. Beijing is unique in this regard,” said Molly Solomon, NBC’s executive producer and president of Olympics coverage, during a company presentation in January.

For the first time ever, the entirety of the Olympics will be available to cord-cutters through Peacock. NBC is looking to avoid disappointing any consumers without pay-TV subscriptions or an antenna looking to watch the Winter Games solely from the streaming platform.

Peacock had its “best-ever weekday viewership” on Friday, and total digital usage—including other NBC platforms—amassed 190 million minutes, NBCUniversal said, adding this was the largest digital consumption ever for an opening ceremony.

Write to Lillian Rizzo at [email protected]