Background on Peacock.

Peacock is a streaming service setup by NBC, which launched putting up most of the NBC/CNBC war chest and also originals.

Some notable shows

Saturday Night Live
Two & A Half Men
Law & Order
Weeds
America’s Got Talent

A ton of series NBC has done over the years.

What makes it unique to Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max and others is it made a freemium approach.

Idea was a tiered subscription, where people can watch most content for free with ads and new shows/ad free viewing is for paid subscribers.

So far the success of that.

54 million people downloaded Peacock.
24 million people use it monthly.
9 million are paid.

These numbers sound good, but at 9 million paid subscribers, that puts them way below everyone else.

Netflix-222 million
Disney-179 million on Disney+, Hulu & ESPN
HBO Max-74 million
Paramount+-47 million
Apple+-20 million

Peacock at 9 million is by far the lowest and there’s a lesson from McDonalds in why.

McDonalds began offering all day breakfast in 2015.

Breakfast was before that 24% of sales.

Revenue jumped up 5.7% nationally, when all day breakfast happened.
In 2020, McDonalds eliminated all day breakfast.

Reason?

Official reason was it was for cleaner kitchens and a less complex menu.

More likely reason?

Franchise owners complained breakfast had a lower profit margin and people weren’t buying food as often, but instead opted for breakfast during lunch hours.

McDonalds doing all day breakfast walked themselves into a world of higher revenue, but lower margins.

NBC making Peacock a freemium product did the same thing, where people download, but get enough content with the free version, no one needs to upgrade.

Where this gets worse?

In 2019, it was reported that Netflix, despite investing tens of billions in original content, new shows only made up 10-20% of what people watched any given day and 80-90% of views were older/licensed shows.

There was even a point in 2019, Friends had more views over all original programming combined.

For peacock, they offered all older content for free and very few went to pay to see the original content.

Final point as a Peacock user, who uses the app at least once a month and has never gone premium.

They were really lazy with the originals.

They launched and the biggest original they marketed was a reboot series to Saved by the Bell, inspired by a YouTube series doing spoof reviews of the original.

My belief is Peacock can turn things around, but will likely have to become a premium only product and also up the original game.