The Most Mockable Streaming Service Has Transformed Itself
Alex Kirshner
6 min read
Who’s watching Peacock? Most of the time, not enough people. Comcast’s streaming service ended the first quarter of 2024 with 34 million paying subscribers. It was the ninth-most-watched U.S. streamer, dwarfed by YouTube and Netflix, but also by Prime Video, Hulu, Disney+, and Tubi. All roughly doubled or even tripled Peacock’s viewing time in June, according to data from Nielsen. The world is still waiting for a fiscal quarter in which Peacock does not lose hundreds of millions of dollars for Comcast.
Maybe it’s no surprise. Peacock was a grating addition to the streaming universe when it arrived in the deeply grating moment of April 2020. Its pitch revolved around sticks, not carrots. Beloved NBC shows that had been licensed elsewhere, like The Office on Netflix, soon came home to a platform without a great catalog. NBC was early in moving sporting events behind its paywall. The user experience was janky, with a blocky interface that felt awkward (at least to me) to navigate. Peacock has consistently ranked last in subscriber satisfaction among big streamers, according to a 2023 research report.
Despite all this, Peacock has inched up over the years. The service has made a lot of originals, some of which have brokeninto the zeitgeist. Time flies, and it gets easier to forget that lots of Peacock’s best stuff used to be at more popular destinations. The paywalling of major sporting events has become common, so Peacock’s exclusive NFL playoff game this January did not feel like an affront to God. The service has also accumulated a huge volume of successful reality TV, making itself indispensable to fans not just of English Premier League teams but also of Vanderpump Rules and Below Deck.
Still, people are not watching. Enter the Paris Olympics, which could—if things go how Comcast wants—become a breakthrough moment for Peacock. If not, it isn’t clear what ever could.
Comcast pays the International Olympic Committee something in the neighborhood of $1 billion per Olympiad to air the Games on NBC platforms. It’s funny because, logistically speaking, the Olympics are an awful TV event. The problem is not that the Games aren’t entertaining, but that time-zone differences and cable’s user interface make them hard to properly absorb. There are about two dozen sports in action on any given day, and often about half of them are live at the same time. This year, lots of them will air at odd hours in the United States, where the mainland is between six and nine hours behind Paris. Effective channel flipping is a challenge even if you’re awake during competition. It is not the NFL, for which a peek at ESPN.com’s scoreboard quickly reveals which contests are exciting and how to find them. At least four Comcast-operated cable channels will show events. Tracking what is where is not exactly hard, but it’s time-consuming. You will at some point forget to flip over to E! or CNBC to watch fencing.
That could all be solved this summer on Peacock. The company says it will offer two different four-screen multiviewers, one that focuses on the most popular sports happening at any given moment and another that focuses on “the most important events” to the competition. Most thrillingly, Peacock is doing its own ripoff of NFL RedZone, called Gold Zone, in which it’ll offer live whip-around coverage of “every event happening at a given time,” NBC says. Viewers will get on-screen prompts allowing them to click to sport-specific broadcasts if they see something they like. For true Olympics sickos and those who like to sleep at reasonable times, Peacock will have full-event replays.
Maybe this won’t work out. Perhaps the user experience will glitch out during the gold medal men’s basketball game. Maybe Peacock’s hackish, A.I.–generated “Daily Olympic Recap on Peacock,” using the voice of broadcaster Al Michaels, will plunge sports media into a hellscape from which we never reemerge. Maybe that will happen anyway. But watching the Olympics and absorbing the best of the Games has always been borderline impossible, and Peacock is our best hope for remedying that problem. It may well be worth a monthly subscription even though the actual sporting events are not streaming-exclusive. One point of encouragement: Peacock’s handling of the 2022 Winter Games was much better than its messy rollout for the Summer Games in 2021. Another leap forward after two years off seems reasonable.
If Peacock does indeed revolutionize Olympics-watching, I will hope for the service’s staying power. But it’s not clear that even a massively successful Olympics would fix its fortunes. The NFL playoffs are the biggest, most bankable show in American entertainment, and Peacock’s exclusive game in January shattered streaming records and became great press-release fodder. That month, Peacock’s share of total U.S. streaming and TV viewership skyrocketed from 1.3 percent to, uh, 1.6 percent, per Nielsen’s measurements. In June, it was back at 1.2 percent. That was after Peacock showed a huge game that required a subscription. The streaming service’s value proposition for the Olympics doesn’t even include exclusivity and is instead about convenience—cool and worth praising, but maybe not a growth juggernaut.
The platform will keep up its involvement with sports post-Olympics, no doubt. The NBA is on its way after next season, joining the biggest soccer league in the world, one of the two most popular college sports conferences (the Big Ten), the Tour de France, and more. But Peacock is already doing most of that, and it turns out live sports cost a lot of money. The service roughly tripled its subscribers between 2022 and 2024, but it lost $639 million in this year’s first quarter. Maybe a new bundle with Netflix and Apple TV+ will help, but the business minds who brought Peacock to life still seem to be struggling with the math.
Peacock is not a classic fit for a scrappy underdog hat. It is a Comcast brainchild that has so far neither improved how we consume entertainment nor made it less expensive. But it has gradually accumulated some pretty good stuff that is indispensable to some, and now it has an opportunity to help sports fans tame the untamable beast that is the Summer Olympics. Subscribe, enjoy it, and remember these days fondly when Peacock gets swallowed up by another streamer or the price gets so high that none of this is cool anymore.
