A report yesterday by The Streamable made a very interesting notation concerning Peacock, the streaming service owned by NBC Universal/Comcast. At a presentation
NBCU CEO Jeff Shell was speaking at the Credit Suisse 24th Annual Communications Conference when he said
“It’s also important to remember that 13 million paying subs comes from only a portion of the country because in Comcast territory, Comcast homes who get Xfinity, get Peacock Premium for free,” he said. “At some point, we’ll roll that to pay.”
First of all, on its own, I find that statement a bit confusing. Because part of Peacock’s approach was to offer the service to cable providers and give it to their customers for free, while of course getting a kickback from the individual providers. So if it is in fact going to stop letting its own subscribers take advantage of its TV Everywhere offer it could lose a lot of money from people who have been so far happy to watch advertising to see movies, TV series, and sports. Peacock also recently rolled out a deal for Spectrum customers to do the same thing. So on that note, I would not be surprised to see that statement clarified or even straight-up corrected.
But either way that statement and the headline that followed could be interpreted as Peacock dropping the free tier of service that people outside of the Comcast world have been accessing since it launched. And for the record, Comcast has not announced that it will be ending that access at all. Customers in Comcasts’s areas actually get a premium version of Peacock for free. The otherwise free service that everybody else signs up for with an email address is missing lots of the content available on the paid tier like live sports, The WWE library, full series runs of popular shows and a bevy of movies.
So relax. If you have been enjoying Peacock’s reduced content free tier of service it is not going anywhere.
