~![Here's freE Watch]* PARIS 2024 OLYMPICS OPENING CEREMONY STreams ON TV Channel 26,July 2024

The opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games will air live on NBC and stream live on Peacock. Paris time zone. Paris is six hours .

🔴 GO LIVE==►► CLICK HERE TO WATCH LIVE

🔴 STREAMING==►► CLICK HERE TO WATCH LIVE

The Paris Opening caremony summer Olympics are finally here.

More than 10,000 athletes have descended on the French capital for more than two weeks of competition, patriotism and potential drama.

What to expect from this year's opening ceremony:

The first events of the 2024 Olympics began Wednesday, but there are no sports today. That's because the opening ceremony starts at 1:30 p.m. ET.

For the first time, the opening ceremony will not take place in a stadium. Instead, athletes will arrive via boat and cruise down the Seine, passing by historic Paris landmarks, including the Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral and the Louvre. Meanwhile, singers Lady Gaga and Céline Dion are rumored to be among the performers.

Organizers say that arson attacks that paralyzed large parts of France's high-speed rail network won't have a big impact on today's opening ceremony.

Stream every moment and every medal of the 2024 Paris Olympics on Peacock, including coverage of the opening ceremony. Read more NBC News coverage of the Games and the athletes competing in Paris, and follow all the action and track upcoming calendar events before they happen so you'll never miss a beat.

Olympic powerhouse Russia, which traditionally sends hundreds of athletes to the games, is sending only around a dozen this year, after years of doping incidents and heightened international condemnation over its war in Ukraine.

And of course, there’s the Seine, the famously filthy river that winds through Paris and — after years of promises, $1 billion of investment and some bacteria-related setbacks — is finally swimmable just in time for the triathlon and long-distance swimming events.

The Seine is also the site of the opening ceremony on Friday, where some 100 boats carrying tens of thousands of athletes and performers will glide down a 3.7-mile stretch of the river as spectators gather on the river banks to mark what organizers are calling the first outdoor opening ceremony in modern Olympic history.

Here’s how to follow along:

How to watch the opening ceremony

The opening ceremony begins at 1:30 p.m. ET (7:30 p.m. in Paris) and is expected to last a little over four hours. The traveling ceremony will work its way from east to west, ending with a final show at the Trocadéro

NBC, which has a lock on Olympics coverage, will kick things off with a preview show starting at noon ET. It will broadcast the entire ceremony live on TV and stream it via Peacock, NBCOlympics.com, NBC.com and the NBC/NBC Sports apps.

Their opening ceremony coverage will be hosted by Kelly Clarkson, Peyton Manning and Mike Tirico, with contributions from Today hosts Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb.

And don’t worry if you can’t give the spectacle your full attention in the middle of the day. NPR will be live blogging the opening ceremony throughout the afternoon right on NPR.org, and NBC will stream the ceremony again in primetime starting at 7:30 p.m. ET.

How to keep up once the games begin

There are 16 days of competition between Friday's production and the closing ceremony, on August 11. You can see the full schedule here.

And despite the six-hour time difference, NBC says U.S.-based viewers will still be able to watch many of the most anticipated events live.

Competition times will run from roughly 3 a.m. ET to 6 p.m. ET, and the network plans to provide at least nine hours of coverage each day.

That includes carrying live competitions during the mornings and afternoons (both on TV and streaming online and on apps) and a three-hour “enhanced Olympic primetime show” each evening, consisting of highlights and behind-the-scenes moments from the day’s events.

Viewers can also follow along via NBC Olympics’ social media accounts, including on Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok.

And of course, NPR’s own Olympics team will bring you recaps, coverage and color — including on the ground in Paris — online and on air over the next few weeks.

How to follow NPR’s coverage

You can find all of NPR’s Paris Olympics stories (past, present and upcoming) here on our website.

To listen to our broadcast coverage, tune to your local NPR station and stream our radio programming on npr.org or the NPR app.

You can also subscribe to our newsletters, including the daily Up First morning newsletter, for updates and analysis straight to your inbox.