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NBC is keeping its bragging rights as the home of the Olympics for another two decades.
On Wednesday, the International Olympic Committee awarded NBCUniversal the U.S. broadcast rights for the Olympic Games across all platforms through 2032.
The cost? $7.65 billion.
NBCU also gets $100 million as a signing bonus which the company said is to be used for the “promotion of Olympism and Olympic values” between 2015 and 2020.
The agreement covers the years 2021-2032, or three editions of the Winter and Summer games each. The company had already held the rights to all of the games through 2020 in an earlier deal negotiated in 2011.
This new pact means that the Peacock Network will have covered 23 different Olympic Games, beginning with the broadcast of the 1964 event in Tokyo.
“This is one of the most important days in the history of NBCUniversal,” said NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke. “The Olympics are part of the fabric of our company, and we couldn’t be more excited that today’s announcement guarantees that this massively popular and profitable programming will continue to air every two years on the broadcast, cable, digital and mobile platforms of NBCUniversal for the next two decades.”
Wednesday’s deal gives NBCU exclusive rights across all platforms, including free-to-air broadcast TV, pay TV, digital, and mobile. The agreement also gives the company the broadcast rights to the Youth Olympic Games through 2032.
Regardless of what happens after 2032, the new agreement means that by the time the deal is up most viewers will never have known the Games to have been broadcast by anyone but NBC and its sister channels. NBC has held the rights to the Summer games since Seoul in 1988, and the Winter games since Salt Lake City in 2002. CBS last aired the games in 1998 at Nagano; ABC hasn’t broadcast the Olympics since the 1988 Winter games in Calgary.
Brief Take: NBCU’s lock on the Olympics gives the company an unprecedented platform every two years to to market its programming and content across broadcast, cable, and digital to a captive audience of sports fans and Olympics viewers.
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