Last month, Richard Schneider received a note that was more exciting than it was problematic: One key Amazon distribution center was running dangerously low on inventory of his indoor and outdoor antennas. Would he be able to send more — and quickly?
“Our Amazon sales were so high, we had to hotshot a pallet of antennas to the distribution center,” Schneider, the CEO of Antennas Direct, told The Desk in an interview last week.
Schneider is used to seeing sales of his TV antennas spike during parts of the year — as more TV enthusiasts drop their expensive cable and satellite subscriptions, they’re turning to a mixture of broadcast TV and streaming video platforms to satiate their needs.
Sports fans, in particular, are among those who are increasingly using antennas. Schneider says Antennas Direct — which makes indoor and outdoor antennas under its own brand, and acquired leaf-style antenna pioneer Mohu some years back — typically sees higher sales around mid-August, to coincide with the start of pre-season football.
This year, the sales spike happened about a month earlier than expected, with sports fans eager to watch NBC’s coverage of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games from Paris.
“We almost hit a sales record in July,” Schneider said. “Our sales were up 70 percent year-over-year.”
At a time when many media and entertainment critics — and even TV fans themselves — have indicated the best days of broadcast television are over, live sports still draws a sizable audience to conventional over-the-air channels.
In the case of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games from Paris, more Americans watched live and replay coverage of the games on NBC’s broadcast network than they did on NBC-owned cable channels or Comcast-owned streaming service Peacock, according to a review of measurement data from Nielsen and Adobe Analytics.
Comcast spent a lot of time, effort and money to make Peacock the premier destination for Olympic fans. The streaming service offered live coverage of all 39 Olympic events, incorporated a dedicated sports-specific menu to help streamers find the precise competition they wanted to watch, and offered a chart that offered a rolling medal count sponsored by Delta Air Lines. Peacock also helped fans find new ways to watch the games, to include a multiview screen across some events and a whip-around style channel called “Gold Zone” that dipped into in-progress events coupled with commentary from NFL RedZone host Scott Hanson.
And, yet, Peacock’s audience was smaller than NBC’s: An average of 4.1 million people tuned in to watch some or all of the Olympic Games on Peacock this year, according to data from Adobe Analytics. By comparison, an average of nearly 31 million people tuned in to watch Olympics coverage on NBC’s linear broadcast and cable networks, Nielsen data showed; most watched NBC’s same-day coverage of events during U.S. prime-time hours.
Schneider says he is unsurprised by the results: Unlike streaming — which typically requires a person to download, install and log into an app — broadcast TV is readily available the moment a TV set is turned on, assuming a viewer has an antenna plugged in. He also says people naturally have a fondness for their local TV broadcasters, something owed to the fact that they cover the community better than the networks do, particularly in mid-sized and smaller markets across the country: “There is a loyalty that people have to their local broadcasters,” Schneider professed, “and that is something where an antenna really shines.”
Data released by NBC proves this to be the case: Most of the top markets that saw the highest share of viewership during the 2024 Summer Olympic Games are in smaller and mid-sized communities, where independent broadcasters own the local NBC affiliate. New Orleans, which ranks 51st out of 210 TV markets designed by Nielsen, had the highest share of viewership, followed by West Palm Beach (39th largest TV market) and Tulsa (62nd largest market). TV markets are ranked by the number of households with at least one TV set in a broadcast area; the Federal Communications Commission officially recognizes Nielsen’s annual list as determining TV markets and size.
Affiliates owned or operated by TEGNA, the E. W. Scripps Company and Nexstar Media Group saw some of the highest viewership during the Olympic Games. Just one NBC-owned station — KXAS (Channel 5) in Dallas — was on the top 20 list.
Reach and Localization
Broadcast executives who spoke with The Desk affirm the viewership figures prove conventional over-the-air TV is not going away anytime soon, even as streaming platforms appear to challenge its dominance.
“Linear television continues to have 100 percent reach across the country, and streaming options like Peacock, even though they’re growing, do not,” Andy Alford, the President of Broadcasting at Nexstar, said in an interview. “So, linear is the easiest and best viewing option for most Americans when they’re looking for the Olympics.”
Alford echoed Schneider’s sentiment that streaming can complicate matters for sports fans, something that has become a more-involved process as sports rights split across different services, which require users to pay for different apps and switch among them.
“I hear it personally from family and friends, I hear it in the industry, about how difficult it is to switch platforms and figure out where your favorite show or your favorite entertainment is coming from,” Alford said. “I think that, for a lot of people, they’re coming back to the idea that watching TV should be relatively easy. It’s supposed to be easy, as opposed to confusing. An antenna is an easy solution, especially for broadcast TV or to watch programming across multiple sets in different rooms, and I think we’re going to continue to see that grow.”
Alford also noted broadcast TV, particularly in smaller markets, have an advantage over streaming platforms because they’re able to localize coverage of a national or international event. Nexstar began planning about a year ago, sending a crew to Paris to prepare for the delivery of live segments that would benefit the company’s 200-plus owned or operated stations.
“We sent an enormous amount of content back,” Alford proclaimed. “And, the reality is, most of the content that we are preparing and sending back is highly localized.”
Nexstar was not alone in preparing early for the Olympics: Peer broadcaster TEGNA started developing plans for its coverage about a year ago, and ultimately sent a crew of eight journalists to Paris, who localized the games for viewers back home. The strategy paid off for TEGNA — five of its NBC affiliates were among the top 20 most-watched during the Olympic Games, more than any other independent broadcaster in the country. Ellen Crooke, the Senior Vice President of News at TEGNA, told The Desk by email that all of its stations “experienced newscast growth during the Olympics,” and that many of TEGNA’s late night and early evening newscasts “saw triple-digit ratings growth compared to June 2024.”
When pared down to the top 10 markets for Olympics viewership, the E. W. Scripps Company topped the list, with four of its NBC affiliates among the most-viewed during the games. Two of the company’s stations — WPTV (Channel 5) in West Palm Beach and KJRH (Channel 2) in Tulsa — tied at second place; its station in Kansas City was the sixth-most watched NBC outlet, and its station in Milwaukee tied for ninth place with two others owned by Gray Television.
Like TEGNA and Nexstar, some Scripps stations sent journalists to Paris to cover the games from different local angles. That went beyond merely covering the events using talent that would otherwise be home, said Brent Chapin, the Creative Director for Local News at Scripps, who said each station looked at market-specific opportunities to localize their coverage of the games.
“Florida, from what I understand, ranks only second to California in terms of athletes that represented Team USA this year in the Olympics,” Chapin said. Journalists at WPTV took note and created behind-the-scenes reports that helped viewers better connect with their hometown athletes who were competing on an international stage.
Related: Special coverage of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games
Perhaps no Scripps-owned station was better positioned to capitalize on the Olympics than KOAA (Channel 5), the NBC affiliate serving Colorado Springs, where the U.S. Olympics & Paralympics Training Center is located. Even before the Olympic competitions kicked off, KOAA was thinking about ways to engage viewers in a way that tied back to the Summer Games, Chapin said.
“KOAA sponsors this huge event, Summer Fest, every year; this year, they took advantage of it to really focus on the Olympics,” Chapin said. “They had former gold medal-winning Olympic athletes in attendance to sign autographs. They had these gold medals made up that said KOAA, and they were handing them out. They broadcast the Opening Ceremony at the event. It was a great way for our people and our anchors at the station to get out there, shake some hands, meet people and really connect with the folks in the community.”
Chapin said Scripps knew early on that the Summer Olympic Games were going to draw large ratings, and the company used it as an opportunity to launch new brand and image campaigns across some of its NBC affiliates, including WTMJ (Channel 4) in Milwaukee.
As with TEGNA, Chapin said Scripps also saw a lift in local newscast ratings, though he didn’t have specific numbers to offer. Chapin said Scripps stations executed on delivering localized news reports to viewers, which resonated across their footprint of NBC affiliates, similar to what other broadcasters reported.
“Local broadcast offers something that streaming can’t,” Chapin affirmed. “They can’t connect with viewers in the same way that we can.”
One major reason is because Peacock doesn’t offer local news programming in most parts of the country, save for a handful of NBC-owned local news streams in areas like New York, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. Streamers in other parts of the country — including 19 of the 20 markets that saw the highest share of Olympics viewership — have to upgrade to Peacock Premium Plus, which costs $14 per month and includes a streaming feed of their local NBC station or affiliate.
Peacock’s Potential
To be fair, broadcast had something of a head start on streaming. NBC has held the rights to the Summer Olympic Games on at least three occasions, with its most-recent streak dating back to 1988. (Rights to the Winter Olympic Games were held by CBS in mid-1990s before moving back to NBC in 2002.) The company only recent began making Olympic events available through streaming: In 2012, NBC allowed cable and satellite customers to use their pay TV logins to watch events live from London, something the network repeated with the 2016 competition from Rio de Janeiro.
Peacock debuted in 2020, with its launch timed to coincide with the Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo. But the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) health pandemic put a wrinkle in that plan, with the International Olympic Committee delaying the games to 2021. When the competition did kick off, few were excited: The difference in time zones — Tokyo is 13 hours ahead of New York City — meant Americans had to stay up very late in order to watch most events, or they’d wake up to push alerts that informed them of the outcomes. Few events were even worth watching, as ongoing public health concerns from the COVID-19 virus meant crowds were not allowed to attend most of the games. Confusingly, Comcast still relegated live events to NBC Sports, which required a pay TV subscription to watch events live, with Peacock only offering a handful of competitions. NBC averaged slightly more than 15 million viewers for the Summer Games in Tokyo, marking the worst ratings since it reclaimed the telecast rights in the 1980s.
In 2022, Comcast decided to offer all events from the Winter Olympic Games in Beijing through Peacock, marking the first time a sports fan could watch any or all of the competitions without a cable or satellite subscription. But the games still suffered from the issues of public health concerns that kept crowds at home and time zone differences that meant events were taking place while most Americans were asleep — which meant the 2024 Summer Olympic Games were the first real opportunity to see if Peacock would truly take flight during an Olympics year.
NBC did not offer daily updates on how well Peacock was performing relative to its broadcast and cable networks during the now-concluded 2024 Summer Olympic Games. Instead, the network occasionally offered data from Adobe Analytics that coupled Peacock with its other streaming platforms — the NBC Sports app, the NBC TV Everywhere apps and NBCOlympics.com, which also offered live coverage of the games.
Those platforms saw 23.5 billion minutes of coverage streamed from late July to early August — a two-week window that included the Opening Ceremony and Closing Ceremony. NBC said Peacock “led” its digital platforms, suggesting most streamers watched Olympic events there, but the network didn’t break out data points for Peacock on an exclusive basis. It did, however, say Peacock-led innovations like multiview, “Gold Zone” and the event-specific navigation were among the most-used streaming features, supporting the idea that people who streamed through Peacock were generally satisfied with the unique viewing opportunites that were there. A spokesperson for NBC Sports did not return a request for an interview, and a spokesperson for Peacock referred The Desk to comments and data points that NBC published online.
A senior-level Comcast executive cautioned viewers and critics from being too quick to write off Peacock, despite the data that showed the overwhelming majority of Olympics viewership took place on traditiona linear television. The executive said the company has “been consistent from the very beginning [that] we have a long term vision and strategy — it’s never been focused on winning [the] court of public opinion or quick press headlines.”
“Streaming is not a spint,” the executive affirmed. “It is a marathon at a sprinter’s pace.”
