Industry Insights: Paris 2024 coverage marks huge shift to streaming services; sports an increasingly global affair; and Netflix viewing surges in APAC.
Summary
- The Paris 2024 Olympics saw a significant increase in viewership compared to the 2021 Tokyo Games, with impressive online streaming figures and social media engagement.
- Warner Bros. Discovery reported a substantial uptick in viewing across Europe, with more than 7 billion minutes of streaming and a six-fold increase compared to the Tokyo Games.
- NBCUniversal witnessed a surge in primetime audiences and streaming minutes, recording its highest Olympic advertising revenue in history.
- The English Premier League (EPL) dominates the sports sponsorship space, with a majority of deals and spending coming from international brands, reflecting the global nature of sports sponsorship.
- Netflix's subscriber growth has slowed in mature markets like North America and Western Europe, but the Asia Pacific region has overtaken Latin America in terms of subscriber numbers, with forecasts indicating continued growth in APAC.
Huge viewing figures for Paris 2024
With the Paralympics still to take place, the Paris 2024 Olympics have already been judged to be a huge success. The IOC estimates that over half of the world’s population is expected to have engaged with the Games via broadcast or digital channels, and individual broadcasters have been keen to share figures.
The BBC's two-week coverage of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games achieved 218m online streams in the UK. That is over double the 104m seen for the 2021 Tokyo Games. While this was no doubt helped by a favourable time zone and many of the events occurring in primetime, the increase is impressive.
With Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) holding the main European rights to full games coverage, there was an impressive uptick in viewing across Europe. While it sub-licensed its rights to national broadcasters such as the BBC, WBD says that across Discovery+, Eurosport and Max, more than 7 billion minutes were streamed over the course of the Games. This is a massive six-fold increase when compared with Tokyo, with coverage reaching more than 215 million viewers in Europe alone, 23% more than Tokyo. Not only were more people watching, but they were watching more too.
This surge continued into social media. There were more than 4.5 billion video views of WBD Olympics posts on social, nearly 10x more than at Tokyo, with TikTok and especially Instagram driving most views.
TikTok itself says that there was a near 2,000% rise in posts about the event compared to Tokyo’s. This perhaps says as much about the growth of TikTok itself in the intervening period, but the key takeaway is that sports rights holders really cannot ignore the impact of social on their overall viewing figures.
Audiences were also up over Tokyo in the USA. Primetime audiences of 30.6 million viewers were up 82% across all NBCUniversal platforms. Led by Peacock, 23.5 billion minutes of coverage were streamed – up 40% from all previous Summer and Winter Olympics combined.
Interestingly for those looking to differentiate their sports services with viewer experiences such as multiview, more than a quarter of the Peacock audience watched via this method; half of the time was spent in the featured live events, half watching in the quad box view. And six out of ten viewers used the Browse by Sport navigation menu in the Olympics hub to quickly dive into a specific sport.
And finally, NBCUniversal recorded its highest Olympic advertising revenue in history, with more advertisers than Rio and Tokyo combined and more than half a billion dollars coming from first-time sponsors. All of which means that when the Summer Olympic flame is next lit in Los Angeles on July 14, 2028, expectations will be even higher and audiences likely even larger.
Sport sponsorship an increasingly global affair
The increasing globalisation of sport is reflected in a new analysis from Ampere which shows the worldwide dimension of sports sponsorship. It highlights the English Premier League (EPL) as the standout player in this space, with a massive 66% of deals and 89% of spend coming from brands headquartered outside of the country. Indeed, it cites the EPL as the most popular sporting competition worldwide, only bested by the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup.
Spanish, Italian, and French leagues also return numbers in roughly the same ballpark before they drop to 41% (deals) and 40% (spend) in the more domestically focussed Bundesliga in Germany.
This is still light years ahead of the figures for the USA, which come in at 15% and 14% respectively. This showcases both the power of the US economy to attract and retain its own domestic advertisers, as well as the relative lack of international appeal in its major sports compared to the global reach of soccer.
APAC overtakes LATAM for Netflix
One company consistently successful when it comes to global reach is Netflix. It currently has 277.65 million subscribers, and has put on close to 40 million over the course of the past year.
Netflix attributes some of its success to its crackdown on password sharing. While Disney will certainly hope this is true as its own crackdown moves into high gear next month, Netflix has worried Wall St. by indicating that the easy gains it once provided may be at an end and subs growth will slow as a result.
Certainly that looks to be the case in its most mature markets of North America and Western Europe, as the following projection from Ampere Analysis shows.
If the plateau in these two regions has not been reached quite yet, it is not far off. Meanwhile subscriptions in the Asia Pacific have overtaken Latin America for the first time. It now has 50.3m subs in APAC compared to 49.3m in LATAM, and Ampere forecasts the gap will increase. Ampere Analysis reckons those figures will rise to 70.1m for APAC and 60.7m for LATAM one the next five years to 2029.
It explains there are several good reasons for this:
- Headroom. Netflix only has a 15% market share across SVOD in APAC (excluding China), the lowest of any region. This gives it plenty of room for growth.
- Localisation. Netflix has paid close attention to tailoring its content to specific markets. For example, local content accounts for 17% or the catalogue in Japan and 13% in South Korea.
- Pricing. Netflix is starting to build momentum in the massive Indian market after reconfiguring its pricing strategy to have a lower point of entry.
- Focus. Netflix is shifting its focus slightly to pay more attention towards both specific and emerging markets as established territories reach saturation.
It will be interesting to see the impact of the latter move. South Korean content in particular has proved wildly popular on a global basis, accounting for 18% of the viewing time among Netflix's top 100 most viewed titles in the second half of 2023. That more than justifies its $2.5bn investment to is making in content from the country up to 2028. It will now be wondering whether investment in local content in other countries can drive growth in their own markets and capture viewers worldwide too.
Main Pic: IOC
