The 2024 Olympics, which closed Sunday with ceremony from Stade de France and a handoff to the next summer games in Los Angeles, averaged 30.6 million viewers across all platforms for its “Paris Prime” daytime telecast (2-5 p.m. ET in the US) and nightly primetime shows.

That’s huge improvement — 82 percent — on the last Summer Olympics three years ago in Tokyo, which averaged 16.9 million cross-platform viewers for daytime and prime telecasts.

The Tokyo games were contested in empty venues due to COVID lockdowns, from a city with much more significant time difference with the U.S. than Paris has.

NBCU also significantly ramped up its streaming presence on Peacock and other digital platforms this year, resulting in widely praised live coverage of every sport and medal event.

The audience for the 2024 Olympics also compares favorably to those in both 2016 (26 million viewers) and 2012 (30.3 million), though streaming was a much, much smaller component of those games. They also aired in a time before Nielsen included out of home viewing in its daily numbers.

For the 17-day run of the games, NBCU had daily average of 4.1 million streaming viewers, primarily on Peacock.

NBCU also says one of every five Olympics viewers spent time with Gold Zone, the hub that often showed multiple events at once and featured nearly every gold medal-winning moment.

Olympics viewing on Telemundo also grew, with Spanish-language broadcasts improving by 26 percent vs. the Tokyo games.

“These Olympics have captivated Americans in huge numbers across NBCUniversal platforms,” NBC Sports president Rick Cordella said. “Led by our best-in-class engineering and production teams in Paris and Stamford, a staff of more than 3,000 worked tirelessly to present these reimagined Games in new and innovative ways in all dayparts and on all platforms. We are thrilled that Americans embraced and enjoyed the Paris Olympics as much as we have.”

Over the final weekend, the men’s basketball gold medal game between the U.S. and France averaged 19.5 million viewers on NBC and Peacock — more than twice the viewers as for the final matchup (between the same countries) in Tokyo and the most watched gold-medal hoops contest since 1996.

NBC News, with both Today and NBC Nightly News beat their network competition over the run of the games (through Aug. 8). Today averaged 3.1 million viewers over that time, and Nightly grew to 7.64 million viewers — compared to 2.52 million and 5.73 million in the four weeks before the games began.