2020 Tokyo Olympics Opening Ceremony Records Lowest Ratings in Nearly 30 Years

Can you guess how many viewers tuned into the televised event?

2020 Tokyo Olympics Opening Ceremony Records Lowest Ratings in Nearly 30 Years

Can you guess how many viewers tuned into the televised event?

The 2020 Tokyo Olympics officially kicked off last weekend. However, according to reports, preliminary figures for the four-hour televised event recorded an average of 17 million viewers worldwide, becoming the least-viewed in the last 30 years for NBC.

This marks the lowest ratings since the 1992 Barcelona Olympic games, while viewership was 35.8 percent below the 2016 Rio Olympics opening ceremony (26.5 million viewers). Despite the numbers, NBC has stated that the opening ceremony’s streaming audience increased by 76 percent from the 2018 opening ceremony in Pyeongchang on the NBC Olympics website and NBC Sports app.

The day before the event, former Fox Sports executive Patrick Crakes told CNN: “This is probably going to be the lowest-rated summer Olympics of all time. They can’t avoid the increased media fractionalization that’s enabling everyone to spend more time with all sorts of content.”