NBCUniversal will serve as the home of the Olympics for an additional four years under a new $3 billion deal unveiled Thursday that keeps the athletic extravaganza at the Comcast-backed media conglomerate through 2036.
The new pact, approved Wednesday by the International Olympic Committee, includes all U.S. media and provides for new joint strategic initiatives and projects. NBCU in recent years has created a suite of digital telecasts and business concepts tied to the Olympics that have, particularly in the most recent Paris Games, helped the event gain new traction with U.S. audiences who have migrated to streaming and broadband for their sports fix.
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“We live in a time when technology is driving faster and more fundamental transformation than we’ve seen in decades. This groundbreaking, new, long-term partnership between Comcast NBCUniversal and the International Olympic Committee not only recognizes this dynamic but anticipates that it will accelerate,” said Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, in a statement. “It is our honor to continue to bring the full power of our company’s expertise in creating and distributing content that connects with Americans, as well as to begin to provide even more innovative technological support and solutions to the IOC and its stakeholders in areas that benefit athletes and the many people dedicated to organizing the Olympic Games around the world.”
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The extended partnership will include efforts to build out technology, collaborate on digital advertising opportunities in the U.S., and provide support for distribution of TV coverage at the venues where the Olympics takes place.
NBCU’s current Olympics agreement, valued at $7.75 billion and slated to end in 2032, has the company working on a Winter Olympics scheduled to take place in Italy early next year and a Summer Games that will originate from Los Angeles in 2028. The company expected to generate more than $1.25 billion in advertising from its work in Paris last year.
The renewed pact would appear to value NBCU’s Olympics rights at around $750 million per year, compared with around $704.5 million in the previous agreement. The company did not discuss details of how the Games would be shown in future years, with the bulk of its cable networks spun off into a separate entity, a business maneuver expected to take place later in 2025.
Comcast and NBCU have tied their corporate fortunes more closely to sports in recent months. Later this year, NBC will launch a new rights deal with the NBA that will put basketball on broadcast primetime for two days a week during certain times of the year, and reduce the amount of traditional scripted programming on its weekly schedule.
The new pact comes after NBCUniversal tore up its old Olympics playbook and focused more intently on reaching younger sports fans who are accustomed to getting clips and streams of their favorite events at moments of their own choosing. That has meant making NBCU’s Peacock streaming service the de facto platform for live coverage and the NBC broadcast network a roost for a curated primetime review that is heavier on feature reporting and analysis. NBCU also ramped up the celebrity quotient around the Games, enlisting personalities like Snoop Dogg and Alex Cooper to provide commentary and interviews. New concepts were introduced, including a commercial-free hour of coverage and a “Gold Zone” whip-around show that took Peacock streamers to the most interesting moments of coverage in real time.
The economics of the Olympics had recently come under pressure, after NBCU muddled its way through three different sets of Games based in far-eastern time zones, including PyeongChang in 2018, Tokyo in 2021 and Beijing in 2022. Two of them were affected significantly by the coronavirus pandemic, but NBC has also grappled with declines in traditional TV ratings and a need to monetize more of the digital activity around the Games.
