The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games Opening Ceremony took place on Friday and recorded the lowest views for an Olympics Opening Ceremony in US broadcast history.

The NBC recorded a total of 16 million views across all platforms, a 43% decrease since the 2018 Winter Games ceremony, which recorded 28.3 million views.

This, however, is not much less than the views recorded during the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, with only 17 million views, the smallest US TV audience since the 1988 Games.

The Opening Ceremony was aired twice on Friday, in the morning and during the prime time evening on all of NBC TV and streaming platforms.

While in Australia, broadcast of the Winter Olympics led Seven Network to take out Nine Network as number one primary channel.

In the lead up to the opening ceremony, Seven had an average of 456,000 views and during the ceremony an average of 388,000.

In the UK, the BBC has been criticised for lack of live coverage of the Opening Ceremony, causing many fans to look elsewhere for Olympics content.

Back to the US, NBCUniversal will air 2,800 hours of Beijing Winter Games coverage across their multiple platforms between 2-20 February.

This will be the NBC’s 18th Broadcast of Olympic games and sixth straight coverage of Winter Games.

NBC will face conflicting broadcast priorities with the Winter Games set to overlap with the 2022 NFL Super Bowl, which NBC airs on 13 February and is predicted to receive more views than the Olympics.