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The 2020 Tokyo Olympics were supposed to be the tentpole content attraction on NBC’s Peacock streaming app when it launched in July. Instead, the Games were postponed one year to July 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and now may be at risk of getting canceled completely.
Peacock launched in July anyway, and has amassed 26 million subscribers as of December, already more than NBCUniversal parent company Comcast’s Xfinity video service.
Now, in the past week, Peacock is making plenty of sports content moves.
On Friday, NBC Sports told its employees it will shut down NBC Sports Network at the end of the year. The channel is best known for having NHL, NASCAR, and Premier League soccer. For this year, some NBC Sports programming, including NHL playoff games and NASCAR races, will move to USA Network. NBC had already moved some 175 Premier League games to Peacock. By next year, expect it to move more games to Peacock.
NBC’s rights deal with the NHL expires this year, and its deal with the Premier League expires next year; if it re-ups those contracts, expect those to go heavy on Peacock as well.
Besides games from soon-to-be-defunct NBC Sports Network, NBCUniversal also just announced a $1 billion deal with WWE to roll the entire WWE Network, which launched in 2014 before the sports streaming boom, into Peacock by March. The deal adds 1.2 million subscribers to Peacock. WWE’s devoted fans will get a better deal than before: $4.99 per month for the ad-supported middle Peacock tier, as opposed to the $9.99 they were paying for WWE Network. (Or they can pay $9.99 for the ad-free Peacock premium tier.) Comcast subscribers get the $4.99 middle Peacock tier for free, so they’ll now get WWE Network for free.
On Monday, NBCUniversal moved even more sports content to Peacock: non-race IndyCar content will be moved from NBC Sports Gold’s IndyCar Pass to Peacock.
NBC’s new strategy for its non-network live sports content is emerging, and it looks a lot like what ESPN is doing with ESPN+.
NBCUniversal over the last few years has offered a slew of sport-specific “passes” through its NBC Sports Gold streaming platform, and it now looks likely all of those will eventually shift to Peacock.
Premier Lacrosse League (PLL), which launched its inaugural season in 2019 with an NBC Sports deal that included some games streamed on Gold, is yet another example. Sources close to PLL tell Yahoo Finance that conversations have already begun about what a transition from Gold to Peacock would look like, in addition to linear options for its next season.