It seems crazy to think about now, but apparently live sports wasn’t originally part of the plan for NBC’s streaming service Peacock.
According to NBC Sports President Rick Cordella on the Marchand Sports Media podcast hosted by The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand, Peacock was intended to compete with Netflix and Hulu in the SVOD space.
“We kind of backed into it. I’m not sure if I’ve ever told the story, but Peacock wasn’t meant to have sports initially. We were trying to be what Netflix was or what Hulu was, which was an entertainment sort of SVOD service,” Cordella told Marchand. “And we were trying to come up with ideas for our launch, which was July 15th, 2020. And because of COVID, the Premier League season was pushed back and they were playing games in the summer. And I remember going to Pete Bevacqua, who was my former boss here at NBC Sports, and saying, ‘Hey, what do you think about pulling some Premier League Games out of NBC Sports Gold…and put them on to Peacock for our launch?'”
It didn’t take long for NBC to figure out that sports could be a huge driver of Peacock’s subscriptions, with Cordella telling Marchand, “Sure enough, you know what drove the most subs on that launch day was the Premier League.”
Of course, live sports are now integral to Peacock’s library. In addition to the Premier League, the streamer airs exclusive NFL games, the Olympics, Big Ten football and basketball, and much more.
What may surprise people is that while live sports may drive the most subscriptions for Peacock, sports fans tend to stick around and watch the service’s entertainment offerings as well. “Our highest usage day on Peacock for VOD was a Sunday following [Peacock’s exclusive] Saturday Wild Card game,” Cordella revealed.
That exclusive NFL Wild Card game is also part of the reason why NBC pursued the NBA as hard as they did. NBCUniversal and Comcast executives saw the power that marquee live sports properties could have on subscriptions and decided to go all-in. NBC’s deal with the NBA begins in 2025 and will provide the company with about 100 regular season games to split between broadcast and streaming during a time of year when the network has not owned marquee live sports.
The network will be taking a page out of the NFL playbook by airing regional coverage on Tuesday nights rather than one game going to the entire country, as fans have become accustomed to in the current deals. “On weekday nights, it’s difficult with the time zone challenges to have that one game. So we thought about it, like, there was enough inventory in the NBA to do this East and West Coast.”
The deal puts NBC and Peacock in a prime position to be a major player in the live sports world for years to come. With the network having rights to the NFL’s Sunday Night Football package through at least 2029 (when the NFL can opt out of its current deals), NBA rights through 2036, and Big Ten football and basketball through 2030, NBC finds itself in a good spot to continue growing Peacock into a profitable venture.
As revealed in Comcast’s earnings call on Thursday, Peacock is still losing hundreds of millions of dollars each quarter. But the streamer’s loss rate is slowing, and the service added over 3 million subscribers last quarter due to the Paris Olympics.
Still, there’s a long way to go before Peacock can supplant the lucrative but declining cable business that NBCUniversal has thrived on for decades. Live sports rights will surely make that transition a bit easier.