Peacock enters uncharted waters by streaming NFL Playoff game

Saturday evening, NBCUniversal will make media history. For the first time, a National Football League playoff game – this one featuring 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 all too aware of the high stakes for the company and its Peacock streaming service in particular.

“There’s a lot packed into this game,” Peacock president Kelly Campbell said in an interview. “We feel that pressure.”

The pressure comes from many fronts. There’s a technical challenge: NFL first-round playoff games regularly draw audiences of nearly 30 million people. Can Peacock, a service with a much smaller subscriber base than rivals like Netflix, Disney+ and Max, handle a crushing increase in traffic without suffering from an embarrassing technological hiccup?

There’s also the question of whether it will upset viewers: For decades, playoff games have been free to watch on network television. Although the game will air for free on local television in Kansas City and Miami, the only way for anyone else to watch it is to hand over $6, the monthly price for Peacock’s cheapest price tier.

And then there’s the crucial business issue: NBCUniversal executives paid more than $100 million for the game, and they’re doing it to get more people to watch Peacock. Will they be able to keep them subscribing month after month to a streaming service that lost nearly $3 billion last year? New subscribers could cancel immediately after the match.

“Especially with this kind of investment, we would like a lot of people to sign up and try us out,” said Mark Lazarus, chairman of the NBCUniversal media group. “And then we want them to use the product a lot and for a long time.”

Unlike many other television genres, sporting events are still primarily broadcast on traditional network TV, and receive huge ratings. Major sports leagues have gotten into streaming — Thursday night NFL games are on Amazon Prime Video — but they haven’t made the full leap yet. The Saturday night match will be the most prominent sporting event exclusively streamed to date.

NBCUniversal executives won’t go so far as to call the game a make-or-break moment for Peacock. But it could be very close.

Peacock was a late entrant into the so-called streaming wars – it debuted in the summer of 2020 – and is only available in the United States. Most media analysts are skeptical that Peacock will ever become a major competitor to Netflix and Disney+, the two largest streaming services. (Netflix has 247 million subscribers and Peacock 30 million.)

Still, Peacock is growing. The streaming service attracted 10 million subscribers last year and boasts a back 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 improved engagement. In November, the service accounted for 1.3 percent of television viewing time in the United States, more than Max, Paramount+ and Apple TV+, according to Nielsen. (Giants like YouTube and Netflix left everyone in the shade: YouTube had 9 percent of the viewing time and Netflix was at 7.4 percent.)

Unlike Netflix, Peacock has also made live sports a backbone of its service. During one weekend in September, Peacock streamed 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 streaming itself.

Years ago, HBO’s streaming service stopped working regularly during major episodes of hit shows like “Game of Thrones” and “True Detective.” Last year, Netflix only tried to premiere a special episode of “Love Is Blind.” so it crashesforcing the company to stream it a day after its scheduled debut.

This is one reason why NBCUniversal executives, along with more than 1,000 people on the technical team, have been preparing for Saturday’s game since May.

For months, senior executives at NBCUniversal have held regular meetings to discuss whether the company is prepared “from a technology perspective,” Mr. Lazarus said. He said the blame for any problems during the game — even if they were caused by a cable provider — would likely fall on “our shoulders.”

There was also a dress rehearsal recently. On December 23, Peacock exclusively streamed a regular season game between the Buffalo Bills and the Los Angeles Chargers.

Mr. Lazarus said he sat by his phone during the Bills-Chargers game hoping it wouldn’t ring because that would indicate a problem. It never went away. The game peaked with 5.7 million concurrent devices using Peacock, the company said, the highest number ever for the service.

Ms Campbell, Peacock’s chief executive, said the company was preparing for “five or six times” that number for the play-off match – not just for the many people who will be watching football, but also for anyone who happens to be watching something else watches on television. Peacock on Saturday evening.

A large influx of viewers creates a new concern for Peacock executives: How do you handle hundreds of thousands of sign-ups in a concentrated period? The peak period for people registering during the Dec. 23 game was a 10-minute period just before and after kickoff, a Peacock spokeswoman said.

Near the end of Saturday’s game, in an effort similar to that for a post-Super Bowl lead-out show, NBCUniversal will begin directing viewers to “Ted,” a new Peacock series derived from the Seth MacFarlane films about a foul-mouthed teddy bear. Likewise, “The Traitors,” the Peacock reality show hosted by Alan Cumming that debuted last year as a modest hit, will begin streaming this weekend.

Whether these shows, and the entire library of content at Peacock, are enough to get millions of people to subscribe remains an open question.

And while many in the media industry are skeptical, Ms Campbell said she was confident this wouldn’t be Peacock’s last chance to convince potential subscribers to sign up. After all, she said, the Summer Olympics, which will be broadcast on NBC and streamed on Peacock, are just around the corner.

“All this preparation and energy that went into this, it’s not a one-time thing, like, OK, we did all that and that’s wasted work,” she said. “This will advance Peacock’s skills in the future.”