NBCUniversal Readies Its First Always-On, Streaming-Heavy Olympics

For the past several Olympics, NBC Sports has often heard the same complaint from audiences, unhappy that many of their favorite events—including the opening ceremony—were only shown on a time-delay, sometimes several hours after they occurred. That all changes during the Tokyo Olympics, as the company is utilizing its entire linear, digital and streaming portfolio to offer more than 7,000 hours of event coverage, allowing even the biggest events to be watched live. “We really have put together the most ambitious coverage plan ever,” Molly Solomon, NBC Olympics Production executive producer and president, told reporters last month at an Olympics press event. “We’ve also adapted to changing consumption habits. Our goal is to be everything for everyone.” That goal is translating into an ambitious Olympic viewing experience for fans, including a wide swath of live events, replays and on-demand programming on year-old streamer Peacock, wall-to-wall 24/7 live event coverage on NBCUniversal-owned cable channels like USA and NBCSN and tentpole live programming events and wide-ranging NBC News coverage on the broadcast side, along with NBC's traditional nightly primetime highlights. Here’s How Connected TV Platforms Are Streaming the Tokyo Olympics In all, the Tokyo Games will be the most widely programmed, and easily accessible, Olympics in history. For NBCUniversal, the programming plan is designed to offer the network two chances to win over viewers: one with high-impact programming on broadcast—both live and curated from earlier in the day—that offers big audiences, and the second through a glut of traffic (and, hand-in-hand with it, advertising impressions) from its digital properties, including Peacock and NBCOlympics.com. “We think there’s an opportunity to have [events] live on Peacock in the morning and our curated package, highly produced, dramatic moments and the entirety of the event on NBC in primetime,” Mark Lazarus, chairman, NBCUniversal television and streaming, told reporters last month. “The time zone allows us, in my view, to get the best of both worlds.” NBC has been slowly increasing its streaming and on-demand options, especially for games where the time zone difference makes live viewing challenging. In 2018, during the Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang, NBC offered a livestream of NBC’s broadcast network for the first time on NBCOlympics.com and on the NBC Sports app. Most of its streamed programming, though, was locked behind cable authentication. Peacock becomes a Games-changer With streamer Peacock now in play, more of the Olympics will be freed up—literally. Men’s and women’s gymnastics and track and field events will play live on the service, available on Peacock’s free tier, and the streamer will also offer up a swath of replays in its Olympics hub. Those tentpole events will be available entirely free with ads, save for one exception: men’s basketball, which Peacock is slotting into its premium tier that starts at $5 a month. NBC is also disseminating its Olympics coverage across most major connected TV platforms, another first for the company. To make its coverage as accessible as possible, NBCUniversal partnered with multiple platforms to create dedicated Olympic dashboards, including Comcast’s Xfinity, Cox, Hulu, Dish, Verizon Fios, AT&T U-Verse, DirecTV, NCTC, Altice, YouTube TV, Google TV, Bing, Apple TV+ and Roku. Most of that coverage will include highlights and condensed replays, and will be powered through NBC Sports. Across both Peacock and on NBC Sports, the company will have 5,500 hours of streaming coverage. Every event is also streaming on NBCOlympics.com and the NBC Sports app, which require cable authentication. That’s not to say it will be necessarily seamless to watch. Seeing as the programs and live events are spread across NBCUniversal and Comcast properties, some match-ups will be locked behind a paywall, and consumers may not always be up to speed on which events are free and which are not. Viewers who tuned into the U.S. Women’s Soccer team’s matchup against Sweden early Wednesday morning, for example, were unable to watch the event without a cable authentication log-in—unless, of course, they turned on plain old cable.