On Saturday night, NBCUniversal will make media history. For the first time, a National Football League playoff game, in this case between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Miami Dolphins, will appear exclusively on a streaming service.
And at NBCUniversal's offices in New York and Los Angeles, executives are acutely aware of how much is at stake for the company and, in particular, its streaming service, Peacock.
“There's a lot riding on this game,” Peacock president Kelly Campbell said in an interview. “We feel that pressure.”
The pressure comes from many fronts. There is a technical challenge: First-round games in the NFL playoffs regularly draw audiences of nearly 30 million people. Can Peacock, a service that has a much smaller subscriber base than rivals like Netflix, Disney+ and Max, handle a crushing surge in traffic without suffering an embarrassing tech issue?
There's also the question of whether this will bother viewers: For decades, playoff games have been free to watch on network television. Although the game will air for free on local television in the Kansas City and Miami markets, the only way anyone else can watch it is by handing over $6, the monthly price for Peacock's cheapest pricing tier.
And then there's the vital business issue: NBCUniversal executives paid more than $100 million for the game, and they're doing it to get more people to watch Peacock. Can they keep them subscribed, month after month, to a streaming service that lost almost $3 billion last year? New subscribers could cancel immediately after the game.
“Certainly with this kind of investment, we would like a lot of people to sign up and try us out,” said Mark Lazarus, president of media group NBCUniversal. “And then we would like them to use the product a lot and for a long time.”
Unlike many television genres, sporting events are still primarily broadcast on traditional television networks and garner huge ratings. Major sports leagues have dabbled in streaming (Thursday night NFL games are on Amazon Prime Video), but they haven't made a full leap yet. Saturday night's game will be the biggest exclusively broadcast sporting event to date.
NBCUniversal executives won't go so far as to call the game a watershed moment for Peacock. But he could get really close.
Peacock was a late entrant to the so-called streaming wars (it debuted in the summer of 2020) and is available only in the United States. Most media analysts are skeptical that Peacock will ever be a major competitor to Netflix and Disney+, the two largest streaming services. (Netflix has 247 million subscribers and Peacock has 30 million.)
Still, Peacock is growing. The streaming service gained 10 million subscribers last year and features an older library of shows like “The Office” and “Law & Order: SVU,” as well as new episodes of Bravo shows like the “Housewives” franchise and “Vanderpump.” ”. Rules.”
Peacock has also seen increased engagement. In November, the service accounted for 1.3 percent of U.S. TV viewing time, more than Max, Paramount+ and Apple TV+, according to Nielsen. (Giants like YouTube and Netflix eclipsed everyone: YouTube had 9 percent of the viewing time and Netflix 7.4 percent.)
Unlike Netflix, Peacock has also made live sports a backbone of its service. During one weekend in September, Peacock broadcast 51 live sporting events, seven of them simultaneously.
However, an NFL playoff game is a much bigger proposition. And technical problems during live events are almost as old as the broadcast itself.
Years ago, the HBO streaming service would periodically go down during premiere episodes of hit shows like “Game of Thrones” and “True Detective.” Last year, Netflix attempted to premiere a special episode of “Love Is Blind” but failed, forcing the company to air it a day after its scheduled debut.
This is one of the reasons why NBCUniversal executives, along with more than 1,000 people on their technical team, have been preparing for Saturday's game since May.
For several months, NBCUniversal's top executives have had regular meetings to discuss whether the company is ready “from a technological standpoint,” Lazarus said. He said the blame for any mishaps during the game, even if caused by a cable provider, would likely fall on “our shoulders.”
There was also a recent dress rehearsal. On December 23, Peacock exclusively broadcast a regular season game between the Buffalo Bills and Los Angeles Chargers.
Lazarus said he had sat by his phone during the Bills-Chargers game hoping it wouldn't ring, because that would indicate a problem. He never rang. The game peaked at 5.7 million simultaneous devices using Peacock, the company said, the most ever for the service.
Campbell, Peacock's president, said the company was preparing for “five or six times” that number for the playoff game, not only for the many people who will be watching football but also for anyone watching anything else on Peacock. Saturday night.
A large influx of viewers creates another concern for Peacock executives: How do they handle hundreds of thousands of subscriptions in a concentrated period? The peak registration period during the Dec. 23 game was a 10-minute period just before and after kickoff, a Peacock spokeswoman said.
Toward the end of Saturday's game, in a push similar to a post-Super Bowl opening show, NBCUniversal will begin directing viewers to “Ted,” a new Peacock series spinoff of the Seth MacFarlane films about a foul-mouthed . Teddy bear. Likewise, “The Traitors,” the Peacock reality show hosted by Alan Cumming that debuted as a modest hit last year, will begin airing this weekend.
It remains an open question whether those shows, and Peacock's entire library of content, are enough to keep millions of people subscribed.
And even if many in the media industry remain skeptical, Campbell said he was confident this would not be Peacock's last chance to try to persuade potential subscribers to sign up. After all, he said, the Summer Olympics, which will air on NBC and Peacock, are right around the corner.
“All this preparation and energy that goes into this, it's not a one-time thing, like, okay, we did all that and it's wasted work,” he said. “This will advance Peacock's capabilities in the future.”
Audio produced by Jack D'Isidoro.
