If you watched TV on a recent Sunday night, there’s a good chance you were watching something on Peacock or NBC. From September 7, 2025, through February 22, 2026, the NBC finished No. 1 in primetime on 23 of 25 Sundays. The data set from the aforementioned dates comes from Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel. The mixed-use of set-top and panel measurements shows both traditional and streaming audiences.
The network’s dominance isn’t just one huge game; the consistency across many Sundays is what makes this noteworthy. NBC turned Sunday night into a weekly sports destination rather than a seasonal one by building a steady pipeline of big-ticket sports like NFL coverage, the Milan-Cortina Olympics, the NBA All-Star Game, and expanded year-round programming.
During the stretch, the network’s primetime Sundays more-than-doubled competition, averaging 21.6 million viewers vs. the combined 10.4 million for ABC + CBS + FOX over the same window. When streaming on Peacock and NBC Sports Digital is included for marquee events (NFL, Olympics, NBA), NBC’s Sunday-night reach rises further, with Nielsen-calculated averages topping 23 million viewers for those telecasts.
“We’re excited to build upon our historically dominant Sunday night partnership with the NFL, as well as three blockbuster Sundays of the Milan Cortina Olympics, the NBA All-Star Game, Sunday Night Basketball, and coming soon, the April 12 NBC debut of Sunday Night Baseball,” said NBC Sports president Rick Cordella. “NBC and Peacock are now the year-round platforms for premier Sunday night sports programming.”
And it’s not just Sunday nights where NBC’s strategy, boosted heavily by Peacock, is reshaping the sports landscape. February has been nothing short of historic for the network and its streaming platform, with Peacock streaming a staggering 6.3 billion minutes of Milan Cortina Winter Olympics content. The streamer helped NBCUniversal reach 200 million total viewers during a “Legendary February” of marquee events. That includes the Super Bowl, the Olympics, and the return of Sunday Night Basketball, each driving audiences in massive numbers both on linear TV and online.
In the era of streaming, the USA–Canada men’s Olympic hockey gold-medal game drew nearly 21 million combined viewers on NBC and Peacock. The average Peacock stream for that game topped 3.7 million viewers, the biggest non-NFL streaming audience the network has ever recorded.
Combine that with technology pushes like Xfinity’s RealTime4K delivery of Super Bowl LX, which offered one of the fastest, most immersive live sports streaming experiences available on Peacock. These investments show that the NBC Sports playbook of stacking big events while enhancing the viewer experience across devices and platforms is making Sundays the new Must-See TV.