A memorable finish to the Olympic hockey tournament delivered a milestone audience for NBC.
Sunday’s United States-Canada Olympic men’s hockey gold medal game averaged 18.6 million viewers across NBC and Peacock, per a combination of final Nielsen data and Adobe Analytics — the largest hockey audience of any kind since the 2010 Olympic gold medal game between the same two teams, which aired in a mid-afternoon window (27.6M).
Viewership doubled the previous high over that span, 9.3 million for last year’s “Four Nations Face-Off” final between the same two teams. That was the only other international tournament since 2014 to feature “best on best” competition after the NHL kept its players out of the 2018 and 2022 Olympic Games.
While sports viewership has generally benefited from Nielsen’s methodological changes of the past few years — including its inclusion and expansion of out-of-home viewing and shift to a new metric combining its traditional panel with “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes — it is highly unlikely that those changes would make a difference in where Sunday’s game ranks historically.
The combined viewership figure includes a streaming audience of 3.7 million tracked by Adobe Analytics, the largest for any NBC Sports program outside of the NFL. (That puts the Nielsen-only audience around 14.9 million. NBC’s position is that because Nielsen does not track its streaming viewership, its combined Nielsen + Adobe audience figures are comparable to the Nielsen-only figures of other networks.)
The United States’ win — which peaked with 26.0 million during the 10:45 AM ET quarter-hour when the game concluded — delivered the largest audience on record for a sporting event that began prior to 9 AM ET, according to NBC. There are of course select few live sporting events that start before 9 AM ET, perhaps most notably the final round of the British Open. Per NBC, no other sporting event in that window reached the 10 million mark.
Encore presentations of the game, including an afternoon replay on USA Network and cut-down late night showing on NBC, averaged 2.1 million. NBC added that to the live total to get to an audience of 20.7 million.
Versus other comparable international competitions, viewership more-than-tripled the audience of the Olympic women’s hockey final between the same two nations, which aired in a weekday afternoon window on cable (5.3M). It fell short of the 2024 United States-France Olympic men’s basketball final, which drew 20.3 million in a Saturday afternoon window, as well as the Argentina-France FIFA World Cup Final four years ago — which aired in a similar Sunday morning window, but had the benefit of leading directly into the NFL (22.32M).
