Peacock had two big announcements last week. First, it launched The Office on Peacock, going as far as launching a sign-up page with The Office-centric tiers:
The marketing push has been aggressive, and for good reason: The Office has made the top 10 of the Nielsen streaming chart every week since Aug. 3-9. If it falls out of the Nielsen ratings in January, never to return for the rest of 2021 (NOTE: which I predicted it will), Peacock is going to have an optics problem.
It sort of already has one with its registered users metric: rather than report paying subscribers, it reported 26.2MM registered users last month.
That number will only go up after the second announcement of the week, a distribution deal with Charter that will put its Premium tier in over 65MM broadband homes (in ~30MM homes via Comcast’s Xfinity,~30MM homes for Charter Spectrum, and in~5MM homes via a deal with Cox Communications). With 105MM to 110MM Broadband-connected homes, Peacock has effectively reached its objective of “a very large portion of the country that’s going to have access to the premium version of Peacock for free through bundling”.
Peacock has pivoted its strategy from three tiers to:
- an emphasis on scaling its free tier, and
- an emphasis on achieving scale for its Premium tier through bundling.
That pivot has fundamentally changed the calculus of Comcast’s bet on Peacock in ways that are more negative than positive for the business.
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