What Peacock’s NFL Playoff Success Means for the Future
The Streaming Wars Are Over, So What's Next?
Saturday night’s Peacock-exclusive NFL game has been the talk of all the socials. (For our international readers, here’s the scoop: For the first time ever, an NFL playoff game aired exclusively on a streaming service: NBC-owned Peacock, which happens to have the smallest user base of all the major and mid-major US services, with about 30 million subscribers. NFL fans were PISSED about having to pay a $5.99 monthly ransom to sign up for the service to just watch one game.)
Here are my thoughts on the fallout:
From Streaming Wars to Streaming Musical Chairs
This might be the moment that marks the end of the streaming wars as we knew it. The end has been nigh for months as the media companies dramatically scaled back content spending, but now we see the legacy players retrenching into what they’ve known to work for a generation: sports, particularly the NFL. To mix metaphors, the “wars” are over and we’re entering the period of Streaming Musical Chairs, as every service scrambles to do whatever it can to find a seat (a scaled, profitable user base) before the music stops (losses, and subsequent debt payments, become too much for Wall Street to tolerate).
Unfortunately, this scramble will be just as chaotic as the end of a real round of musical chairs, and consumers will pay the price (literally and figuratively). As desperation escalates, so will the tactics, and putting a single playoff game behind the $5.99 paywall will look like an act of generosity in comparison.
Sidenote: Kudos to Bob Iger. Despite his flagging stock price and recent content failures, you could argue Disney and Netflix are the only two streaming players who have found a long-term seat in this game of musical chairs (Amazon doesn’t count).
NFL as Kingmaker
Monday after the game NBCU was peacocking about the viewership results: 23 million viewers, the largest audience for a livestreamed show in US history. That’s a great number for NBC, but it’s even better for the NFL. One game has shown that its cultural dominance can be translated into the digital age with barely a dent. (It got more viewers than some games that aired on linear TV last year.)
Over the last five years, the NFL overcame its CTE crisis and unenthusiastic (being generous) response to Black Lives Matter and looks likely to emerge from the current media chaos as the nuclear weapon of the streaming age. As such, it has the potential to be both kingmaker and executioner for media companies for the next decade. There is a rumored investment in ESPN, which would almost certainly accelerate ESPN’s DTC timeline.
The Long and Short of It
You have to question the long-term wisdom of making your first interaction with a new customer so negative, so opportunistic. This play feels like the content equivalent of a $25 umbrella during a thunderstorm.
The 23 million viewers and presumptive massive bump in subs is great, but subscription businesses are just as much about mitigating churn as they are about acquisition, and as the landscape consolidates more, the brand equity of these services are increasingly important.
An alternative view: maybe Comcast realizes Peacock has already lost the streaming wars, and this is a simple lever to goose the short-term value in advance of its inevitable combination with Max (to be called Maxcock, obviously) or Paramount+ (Paramount+Cock). Regardless, as mentioned above, this won’t be the last instance of stream-gouging as the platforms try more and more hail marys before the music stops.
Consumer Hackathons
I also wonder if the move is educating consumers in exactly how easy it is to password share Peacock. (Since Taylor was at the game, even my football-apathetic Swiftie sister asked to borrow my Peacock login so she could watch the game.)
It’s not surprising that people would fight back against the commercial cynicism brought on by how rapidly the landscape is changing. And password sharing is just the beginning. As the services bundle and unbundle, ally and divorce, and strike ever-unique deals, we’ll see a proliferation of methods for users to game the system, ranging from the basic and legal (regimented churning and deal hopping) to complex and fully illegal (old school piracy), and everything in between.
I can’t wait for the inevitable onslaught of content hacking experts who dispense advice on how to get the content they want for as little (or no) money as possible. For example, I get my access to Paramount+ (exclusively for UEFA Champions League) for free via my Walmart+ membership, which I’ve never used and get for free via my credit card.
This Week’s Whimsies
Much more on the streaming quest for profitability, and other views of the coming year in entertainment this year.
An historical view of previous moments in TV history that featured the same tensions between past and future, free and paid.
I love this list of 55 random observations from a traveler taking a year off from work:
This piece on the lingering and ever-lasting effects of the pandemic on education and mental health, from Matt Klein and VC Hannah Grey, is… sobering. But it also inspires ideas on what can be done now and into the future.
Plagiarism is the Next ‘Fake News’. Yikes.
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