Getty’s painting

Katie Ledecky, Simone Biles, Suni Lee, Snoop Dogg, basketball, boxing, tennis, rowing, fencing, water polo, soccer, beach volleyball! 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris were lit!

So much so that NBC is bragging about how much the Paris Olympics have disrupted workplaces across America.

“The ratings show that America is infatuated and that productivity is lacking in many workplaces, and we are ready for that. We set a goal early on to make America unproductive all day long,” Molly Solomon, president and executive producer of NBC Olympics Production, said during a press conference.

This is not an exaggeration (as is the case with NBCUniversal).

“We did some research on our viewership,” Solomon continued. “One in four people said their job performance dropped during the Olympics. Two in three people said the Olympics provided an escape. And half said they changed their daily routines to watch the Olympics.”

Over five days of competition and one day of ceremonies, the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics have amassed more than 8 billion minutes of streaming time—more than the number of minutes streamed at the Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022 Olympics combined. With 13 days to go,

“If you look at it holistically, about two-thirds of our audience came from prime time, even though all the action was live during the day,” said Rick Cordella, president of NBC Sports. “And Peacock was a huge part of that audience. You saw the numbers in our press releases, we were consistently hitting 5 million streaming viewers on competition days. And they came from all over the place, from live events to live shows like Gold Zone and others.”

Cordella added: “It’s great to see in the afternoon, Paris Prime as we called it, where we saw huge numbers. Our strategy of having everything live in the afternoon with fully produced, high-quality productions in prime time on our widest platforms, the biggest events, is something we’ve never done before.”

Thanks to streaming, the Olympic Games as we know them will never be the same.