Nearly nine million Canadians watched the end of the men’s gold-medal hockey game at the Milano-Cortina Olympics, which CBC says was Canada’s most-watched moment at the Games.
But it’s an apparent decline from Sochi 2014, the last time Canada’s men’s hockey team made it to the gold-medal matchup, when CBC said 15 million Canadians tuned in to some portion of the game and average viewership hovered at 8.5 million.
CBC didn’t say how many people watched this year’s game in total, or what the average viewership throughout the game was: only that 8.7 million were tuned in for the final goal, a number that doesn’t include those streaming on Gem, a spokesperson said.
The broadcaster says roughly 30.5 million Canadians, about 73 per cent of the population, watched some portion of the Olympics on CBC’s English and French TV networks and broadcast partners TSN, Sportsnet and RDS.
The broadcaster says its online content received 89 million “streams,” which are counted when someone clicks the “play” button. That compares to 74 million streams during the Paris 2024 Olympics.
There’s no minimum watch time required for it to be considered a stream, but the public broadcaster says viewers watched 42 million hours of content on CBC’s digital and streaming platforms this year, including CBC Gem.
CBC says that’s three times as many as the Beijing Olympics in 2022.
The 2022 Games were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and while streaming numbers were up from previous years as the technology was more widely adopted, viewership was generally lower than usual.
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CBC said it made promoting Gem a priority this year.
“Our main messaging across all of our [social media] platforms is to watch on CBC Gem,” said Monika Platek, senior producer of content and publishing for CBC Sports, in an interview during the Games.
She said they were also considering the “second screen” experience for viewers as they crafted social media content.
“They really are watching the Games across many different platforms, even simultaneously,” she said. “We believe that people are watching Gem, but they also have their phone open and they’re on TikTok.”
They wanted their social media coverage to complement, not duplicate, the main show.
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CBC Sports’ most popular TikTok videos during the Games included an impromptu interview with mogul skier Maia Schwinghammer’s dad, who teared up talking about watching his daughter compete at the Olympics, earning 5.3 million views and nearly 650,000 likes.
The bite-size content varied but was designed to grab fans and mindless scrollers alike — a split screen of hoarse-voiced announcers on the edge of their seats and shouting “the King has reclaimed his crown” as Mikael Kingsbury took gold in men’s dual moguls; a birds-eye-view camera of Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier’s emotional Vincent van Gogh-inspired ice dance; a clip showing the website where each member of the Canadian women’s hockey team pronounces their own name.
“Emma Maltais? Emma Maltais,” Emma Maltais says at the beginning of the clip, which got nearly seven million views and more than 220,000 likes.
As for traditional TV, CBC said peak viewership came in the final moments of the men’s gold-medal hockey game and the second-most viewed moment came in the final minute of the semifinal victory over Finland.
Meanwhile, it said 4.22 million viewers watched the final minutes of the women’s gold-medal hockey game, which the U.S. also won over Canada, and 3.1 million watched Canada win the gold medal in men’s curling over Great Britain.
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