The USA-Russia Olympic men’s hockey game, which went to an eight-round shootout before a Team USA victory, became the most-streamed hockey game in NBC Sports and NBC Olympics history.
The game was live-streamed on NBCOlympics.com and the NBC Sports Live Extra app by nearly 600,000 unique users (598,552, to be exact) and delivered 14.7 million minutes of consumption, both surpassing all match-ups from the Vancouver Games and the previous record-setting 2014 NHL Stanley Cup Final.
The uniques and minutes are, respectively, the second and fifth-best NBC Olympics’ streams ever.
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Last night’s primetime Olympics telecast on NBC (8-11 p.m. ET) averaged 19.2 million viewers, which along with last week’s Sochi Winter Games Opening Ceremony telecast (31.7 million viewers) rank as the two most-watched Friday primetime TV shows since the 2012 London Olympics, according to live plus same-day fast national Nielsen data.
That doesn’t mean that it was necessarily a victory for the broadcaster, though: NBC’s Friday night received an 11.0 household rating/19 share, down from the comparable Friday of the 2010 Vancouver Games, which posted a 13.4 household rating/23 share and averaged 23.3 million viewers.
Friday was the lowest-rated of the Sochi Games’ coverage on NBC thus far. Though that is not totally unexpected as it was the first Friday night of the 2014 Olympics since the Opening Ceremony.