While the most anticipated action on Peacock this year will certainly be the 2020 Summer Olympics, which of course are being held after a year long delay, Comcast would be smart to set it sights on another big prize.
Multiple companies are looking into putting in a bid to grab the NFL Sunday Ticket, which grants access to every football game outside of a viewers primary area. The program has long been a staple of DIRECTV and was one of its anchor features when the first mass satellite cableSubstitute debuted in the 1990s. With the decline of the companies numbers and AT&T spinning the company off along with his other TV products this year it is expected that the service could find a new home. And while ESPN and Amazon are expected to push for the service the one that needs it the most is certainly Peacock.
Peacock simply has just about nothing to hang his hat on at the moment. The Olympics last two weeks and may well be a big driver for the service during the month that it airs, but there is not any pole programming on the service at the moment. It’s original programming has not created many ripples in the pond that is the streaming industry at the moment and nothing on the way has any buzz. The vast number of users access to service less than once a monthEnd it is estimated that of the 42 million registered users less than a third pay you and as much as $4.99 to use it per month.
Bringing in NFL Sunday Ticket would help strengthen the appeal that it started by adding WWE content. The content from the wrestling world has been filling up the coffers at Peacock for a few months now.But it’s day in and day out sports coverage is not nearly as main stream. In the football department NBC is host to Sunday night football which has been available through the NBC Sports app. The majority of peacocks sports programming is soccer and motorsports. Both sports have followings of course but they were pale in comparison to the NFL. I mean everything pales in comparison to the NFL as far as ratings go on a weekly basis during the season.
If peacock becomes home to NFL Sunday ticket it’s got a real shot to become a destination for cord cutters streamers sports fans in general. If it does not grab Sunday Ticket It has a shot to not exist by the time the next Summer Olympics roll around. Now Peacock is hardly some kind of start up. It is Comcast. but having a lot of money doesn’t necessarily make something a winner and we have seen powerful entities dumb TV projects. For instants AT&T dropping the Warner media stations and setting up the new deal with discovery. Or Google abandoning original programming, Microsoft launching and quickly shuttering Microsoft studios for original streaming content and the disappearance of Sony PlayStation Vue.
there certainly does not have to be a Peacock out there to watch. The vast majority of its programming is already on Hulu. And if Comcast decides that he can make enough money license in the program to Hulu and stop spending money on originals that aren’t capturing anyone’s imagination or paying the WWE to air it’s major events and so on It may eventually just decide that having a cable company and multiple TV stations and a major network is enough for the moment. But Comcast must know that the future is in streaming. Its competitors certainly know that. Disney has 4streaming services if you count Hulu with live TV is separate from Hulu along with ESPN Plus and of course the monster Disney+. ViacomCBS has three major streaming services with showtime, Paramount+ and Pluto TV. And then there’s Comcast, The last one to get into the game.
Not only does peacock need this Sunday ticket to increase attention to it service, it needs it as a defensive move. If Disney gets a hold of it and drops it on to ESPN+ it will most definitely become a major hit on the streaming sports network. Amazon might even just tuck it right into the Prime membership and the costs like it has for Thursday night football. But if either were to have the service and keep it out of the hands of Peacock it would continue to make the service look second tier in comparison to others.
The next year is going to be an interesting one for streaming and sports. The following year could be a very interesting one at Peacock if it doesn’t find a big hit soon.
