Team USA’s Men’s Hockey team brought home the gold at the Milan Cortina Olympics on Sunday to a TV audience of 20.7M in total.
That’s across NBC, Peacock and Versant’s USA Network, according to a combination of Nielsen Big Data + Panel and Adobe Analytics digital data from NBCUniversal.
From NBC and Peacock alone, the match — which saw Team USA beat Canada in overtime — averaged 18.6M viewers and peaked at 26M for the game-winning goal, the networks’ parent company said Tuesday.
Per NBCU, that’s a record for a sporting event that began earlier than 9 a.m. ET. It’s also NBC Sports’ second most-watched hockey game ever, behind only the USA-Canada men’s gold medal game at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, which had 27.6M viewers tuned in thanks in part to a much more favorable 3:15 p.m. ET start time.
The men’s hockey gold medal game also had the biggest NBC Sports streaming audience when excluding NFL, bringing in 3.7M viewers across digital platforms, led by Peacock.
The United States Women’s and Men’s Hockey Teams both defeated Canada in overtime to secure Olympic gold medals. The women’s match was the most-watched women’s hockey game on record, averaging 5.3M viewers across USA Network and Peacock. The audience peaked in overtime with 7.7M.
The hockey ratings wins helped cap a successful presentation of the Milan Cortina Olympics for NBCUniversal as the most-watched Winter Games in more than a decade. The audience was up 96% from the 2022 Beijing Olympics, due at least in part to the much more favorable time zones this time around. There were also some standout moments for U.S. athletes at the Milan Cortina Olympics that surely helped drive viewers to tune in, including the aforementioned hockey games.
English (US) ·