NBC, by all accounts, made a mess of these Games. In terms of ratings and advertising dollars, especially on Peacock, it paid off. In the UK, Discovery+ became the fastest growing paid streaming service this month, justifying the more than $1 billion it cost to take control of the rights (in the UK) from the BBC. It's also no coincidence that ratings for traditional broadcasters, without wall-to-wall OTT options, have been less than stellar.

Viewers in Europe have enjoyed the Games being in the same time zone. That won't be the case in Los Angeles in 2028 or Brisbane in 2032. The Guardian's correspondent noted that some AI highlights were not up to the highest production values; there were glitches in the live stream and some wasteful duplication, showing that corrections are needed. The Olympics proved beyond doubt that there is still a huge appetite for live, shared television events, especially those where viewers have every opportunity to pick and choose what they want to watch, generally slicing and dicing content as they please.

For Warner Bros. Discovery, the Olympic success came as a welcome relief after weeks of bad news that saw it write down the value of its TV channels by $9 billion, accompanied by doomsday headlines about the future of television. WBD is currently reeling from the loss of NBA rights to Amazon. CEO David Zaslav is considering an asset sale to restore investor confidence.

The challenge for WBD going forward will be to keep those subscribers engaged over the next four years. WBD's Olympic rights package also includes the 2026 Winter Games in Milan-Cortina and the 2030 Winter Games in the French Alps. If that is not enough, they will need to retain and attract more sports fans (bearing in mind they have lost the NBA). Paris has shown an appetite for streaming coverage and WBD will likely want to replicate some aspects of Olympic coverage to feed into coverage of its regular properties such as tennis majors and cycling between now and the next Olympics.

WBD said in its bulletin that the cumulative reach of more than 215 million in Europe watching Olympic content on its platforms was 23% (+40 million) higher than for the Tokyo Games in 2021. This includes Max and Discovery+, Eurosport TV channels, free-to-air networks in Norway (TVNorge), Sweden (Kanal 5) and Finland (Kutonen, TV5).

It saw a record number of new paid streaming subscribers during the Games, 77% more than Tokyo 2020, with the most significant growth in France, Italy, Poland, Sweden and the UK. WBD also saw 4.5 billion video views of its Olympic content on social media, almost ten times more than Tokyo 2020.

Andrew Georgiou, President and MD, Warner Bros. Discovery U.K. & Ireland and WBD Sports Europe, said: "Max has proven to be a game changer for sports viewing with an enhanced product experience and new interactive features that have encouraged more subscribers to come to the platform and stay engaged for longer."

JB Perrette, CEO and President, Global Streaming and Games, WBD, said: "Paris 2024 has exceeded all expectations for Max and the Warner Bros. Discovery streaming business. We've added millions of new paying subscribers and engaged millions of daily streaming viewers who watched billions of minutes of content during the Games. Our streaming growth momentum is only increasing, and we've still got almost half of the global addressable market to go.

The IOC wasted no time in declaring the scale of its coverage and reach, claiming that more than half of the world's population had engaged with Paris 2024 via broadcast or digital channels. OBS's online content delivery platform (Content+) became the primary method of delivering short-form and social media content to the 36 media rights holders. More than 17,000 pieces of content were made available, including approximately 790 pieces of vertical content designed specifically for social media. This resulted in more than 113,000 downloads over the course of the Games, according to the IOC, and "unprecedented" results on Olympic social media handles, with more than 12 billion engagements - more than double that of Tokyo. There was record usage of the Olympic web and app, reaching around 300 million people during Paris 2024, the highest for any edition of the Olympic Games. AI was used to generate over 95,000 automated highlights from the more than 11,000 hours of OBS.

In the UK, many people were upset that the BBC had to reduce the number of hours of Olympics it could show after losing some rights to Discovery+. Traditionally, this content had been shown for free.
BBC Sport's coverage of the Paris Games was streamed a record-breaking 218 million times online, more than double the Tokyo total of 104 million, with 12.2 million people watching on iPlayer.

Over 28 million unique users and 8.9 million registered accounts used the BBC Sport website and app for the latest news and updates from Paris, with 62.2 million online requests for highlights clips. In addition to the live coverage on iPlayer and the BBC Sport website, BBC One enjoyed "consistently high" viewing figures throughout the Games with 36.1 million viewers (59% of the UK population and a peak of over 6 million on 14 separate days).

Alex Kay-Jelski, Director of BBC Sport, said: "It's not an easy job, but these figures across digital, linear, online and audio show that BBC Sport's unique multi-platform offering is capable of uniting the nation with the very best of British storytelling.

It was not hard to predict that streaming of the Olympics would become the new gold standard. Streaming has so many advantages. When you can watch what you want, when you want, there is literally no reason to stick with old cable/satellite TV. There's so much going on during major events like the Olympics that it's impossible to watch everything you want in real time. Platforms give you access to every arena, every event. Warner Bros. Discovery gained a lot from showing Paris 2024: money, new subscribers, new advertisers and, most importantly, they proved their very high position in the streaming market.

The industry now has 4 years to study what the Olympics mean for the market. Any mistakes can be fixed, new ideas can be brought to the table. We can expect the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles to be pivotal for streaming. They may be the last games to be shown on TV channels, and investing time, money and energy into streaming sports can be very profitable. Early data clearly shows that this is a big and tasty cake. Now is the time for the streaming giants to take notice and start competing as hard as the athletes.

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#SzymonKarbowski #StreamVX #WarnerBrosDiscovery #videostreaming #OlympicStreaming

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