WBD Basks in Record Olympic Streaming but the Challenge is Retaining New Subs
The results are in, and the winner by a mile are The Streaming Olympics. Labelled, rightly, ‘the first true Olympiad of the age of perpetual content,’ the decision by the Olympic host broadcaster OBS and some key rights holders to embrace the everything everywhere of action from Paris and to stream it online is a triumph – with irreversible implications for the future of live.
NBC by all accounts threw the works at these Games and it has paid off with handsome viewing figures to pair with advertising dollars, particularly on Peacock. In the UK, Discovery+ became t0he UK’s fastest growing paid streaming service this month, justifying the more than $1bn it took to take control of rights (in the UK) from the BBC.
It’s no coincidence either that the reviews of coverage on conventional broadcasters, without wall-to-wall OTT options, have not been as good.
There are lessons though. Audiences in Europe have enjoyed the Games being contained in the same time zone; something that won’t be case in LA 2028 let alone Brisbane in 2032.
As noted by The Guardian’s correspondent, some AI highlights have not matched the highest production values; there have been glitches in the live stream and some wasted duplication. These will be ironed out. In the meantime, what this Olympics has demonstrated beyond doubt is that there remains appetite for live shared televised events provided audiences are given every option to slice and dice content as they wish.
WBD wishes the Summer Games were every year
For Warner Bros. Discovery Olympic success is a welcome respite from weeks of bad news which has seen it forced to write down $9bn in the value of its TV channels accompanied by doomsday headlines for the future of TV. WBD is also smarting from the loss of NBA rights to Amazon and CEO David Zaslav contemplating an asset sale in order to restore investor confidence.
Following the Paris Games, arguably its Eurosport division which owns the rights to the next two Summer games in LA and Brisbane in Europe, is the prize asset which just shot up in value.
The challenge for WBD going forward will be to keep those subscribers engaged over the next four years. True, WBD’s Olympic rights package also includes the Winter Games in Milan Cortina 2026, in the French Alps 2030 but it will need to retain and recruit more sports fans, particularly given the loss of NBA. Paris has proven the appetite for streaming coverage and WBD will likely want to replicate some aspects of the Olympic coverage to feed into coverage of its regular properties like tennis majors and cycling until the next Olympiad.
In a bulletin touting the response to its coverage, WBD said cumulative reach of more than 215 million in Europe viewing Olympics content on its platforms was 23% (+40 million) more than for the Tokyo Games in 2021. This includes Max and discovery+, as well as Eurosport TV channels and free-to-air networks in Norway (TVNorge), Sweden (Kanal 5) and Finland (Kutonen, TV5).
It saw a record number of new paid streaming subscribers over the Games period; 77% more than Tokyo 2020 with most significant growth in France, Italy, Poland, Sweden and the UK.
WBD also boasted 4.5 billion video views of its Olympic content on social which is nearly ten times more than Tokyo 2020.
Andrew Georgiou, President and MD, Warner Bros. Discovery U.K & Ireland and WBD Sports Europe, noted: “Max has proven to be a game-changer for sports viewing with an enhanced product experience and new interactive features which encouraged more subscribers to come on platform and stay engaged for longer.”
While streaming led the way with more than 7 billion?minutes streamed over the course of the Games by WBD (six times more than Tokyo) it was at pains to point out that its linear TV audiences were double that of the previous Games demonstrating the continued attraction of the Olympic Games in Europe across all platforms, it said.
JB Perrette, CEO and President, Global Streaming and Games, WBD said, “Paris 2024 has exceeded all expectations for Max and Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming business. We’ve added millions of new paying subscribers, and engaged millions of viewers daily on streaming who have watched billions of minutes of content during the Games. Our streaming growth momentum is only gaining strength, and we’ve still got almost half the global addressable market to go.”
IOC official media and broadcast stats
The IOC wasted no time in declaring the extent of its coverage and reach, claiming that over half of the world’s population would have engaged via broadcast or digital channels with Paris 2024.
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. Over 17,000 pieces were made available, of which approximately 790 are 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 Olympics social media handles, with over 12 billion engagements, - more than double that of Tokyo.
There was record usage of the Olympic web and app, reaching approximately 300 million people during Paris 2024, the highest for any Olympic Games edition.
AI was used to generate over 95,000 automatic highlights culled from the 11,000+ hours produced by OBS.
How the BBC fared
The BBC, traditional free to air home of the Olympics in the UK, has had the number of hours it could show slashed after losing some rights to Discovery. That led to criticism from some viewers annoyed that the broadcaster wasn’t covering the events they wanted to watch.
BBC Sport’s coverage of the Paris Games was streamed a record-breaking 218 million times online, more than doubling the Tokyo total of 104 million, with 12.2 million people watching on iPlayer.
Over 28 million unique users and 8.9m signed in 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 competition with 36.1m watching on TV (which is 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 is not an easy job, but these figures across digital, linear, online and audio demonstrates that BBC Sport’s unique multiplatform offer is capable of uniting the nation with the very best of British storytelling.”
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