How many people watched the Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony?

How to get close to this number

Place it between the two anchors this site provides. A World Cup final reaches around one and a half billion and the largest American broadcast reaches a hundred and twenty million. An Olympic opening ceremony is globally broadcast but not a competitive event, which puts it below the football final and far above the national one.

Opening ceremonies reach wide but shallow audiences. They are broadcast free-to-air in most countries and watched partly out of curiosity rather than fandom, so reach is high and sustained attention is low. That is the opposite profile to a sporting final, where the audience is smaller and completely engaged.

The staging detail in the explanation is why this one drew attention: the first Summer Olympics opening held outside a stadium, staged along six kilometres of river with athletes arriving by boat. Audience figures for ceremonies respond to novelty more than to the Games themselves, and this was the biggest format change in the event's modern history.