NBC ripped up its Olympics playbook for 2024 — so far, the new strategy paid off

Comcast's NBCUniversal has a longstanding bet on the Olympics, but this summer the company threw all of its resources at the Games in a bid to grab more viewership — especially for its growing streaming platform, Peacock.

It appears to have paid off so far — more than 30 million people tuned in to NBC's TV and streaming platforms to watch the games, and a record $1.2 billion in advertising revenue was generated.

NBC executives, having touted the Olympics as a growth driver and differentiator in the increasingly crowded landscape of streaming and live sports, are now looking to extend the benefit beyond the Games and into future live sports.

"We completely changed the game plan internally. We ripped up the playbook two years ago," said Jenny Storms, chief marketing officer of entertainment and sports at NBCUniversal. "It was very scary at the time to take the institutional knowledge that we had for so long and rip it up and start over. We really started new and fresh in totality, from production to company wide counterparts."

The Olympics have long been key to NBCUniversal. Paris marked the 18th Olympic Games broadcast by NBC in the U.S. The company renewed the rights in 2014, agreeing to pay $7.65 billion for the Games between 2022 and 2032, amounting to more than $1.2 billion for each.

Just before Paris, efforts had fallen flat. The 2021 Tokyo Olympics and 2022 Beijing Olympics drew the lowest-ever audiences for Summer and Winter Games, respectively.

Storms noted there were factors at play in those last two Olympic Games that were largely out of NBCUniversal's control.

Both of the Games were shrouded by the early stage of the pandemic. Tokyo was postponed by a year, and fans and families weren't present at either games. The