Inside Peacock’s Ambitious Plan to Crash a Crowded Streaming Field - Variety

In September 2019, Steve Burke, then NBCUniversal chief executive, called Matt Strauss, with a question: Would he take the wheel of the Peacock project.

And Strauss, who at the time was executive VP of Comcast’s Xfinity consumer services, based in Philadelphia, would need to relocate to New York City.

“This is the only strategy that NBCU can really have,” she says.

Like every other media and entertainment conglomerate, NBCU needed a direct-to-consumer play in order to have access to first-party data and best monetize its intellectual property, says Martin.

Only in the past few years has the effect of cord-cutting on cable TV pushed Comcast to fully embrace internet video — an effort, not incidentally, led by Strauss.

The industry’s read on Peacock is that NBCU started with the same idea as everyone else — to create a subscription service to compete with Netflix.

“In a global business worth billions of dollars, we always anticipated more entrants into free streaming and AVOD,” says Tubi chief revenue officer Mark Rotblat.

“Marketers need scale, and there’s no surrogate for free, premium content in generating scale,” she says.

To get Peacock without any ads, it’s another $5 per month, but Strauss says that isn’t where the team is focused.

Fast forward two years, he says, and the goal is for “the majority of market to be able to get Peacock free.”.

In other words, as Strauss outlines it, Peacock looks sort of like a basic cable channel — except, he says, NBCU is not asking for carriage fees from any affiliates.

Shell’s vision with the reorg is “how are we going to organize the company for the next decade,” says Lazarus.

But he says the silver lining is that NBCU was able to reallocate to Peacock promotional resources that would have gone to the Summer Games.

Strauss is well suited to adapting to shifting conditions, according to a former colleague, who says he’s an exec who embodies “the Comcast way”: He’s a strategic thinker who doesn’t panic, can maintain enthusiasm without being Pollyannaish and engenders team loyalty?

Strauss says Lazarus is helping Peacock get buy-in from other parts of NBCU that may be reluctant to move fast.

“Challenging the status quo, it takes time,” Strauss says.

During the pandemic, Peacock has been able to “accelerate our deal flow” for content licensing, Strauss says, citing pacts with A+E Networks, Warner Bros., Sony and Paramount.

The Peacock Premium tier will have close to 20,000 hours of content at launch (versus the 15,000 hours NBCU projected earlier this year), and Peacock Free will have more than half the titles in the upper tier.

News and sports are “an important part of our content strategy,” says Frances Manfredi, president of content acquisition and strategy for Peacock and NBCUniversal Digital Enterprises.

As Manfredi concedes, Peacock isn’t going to get content from some quarters.

“It would be stupid to deny that the vertical integration isn’t happening in the market,” she says.

On the other hand, the Peacock acquisitions team has had “a lot of discussions with studios that felt their content potentially gets lost on really large platforms.

“We need a certain amount of those shows that create bigger swings.” The fact that Peacock isn’t going to churn out hundreds of originals (which it wouldn’t be doing even without COVID) is something McGoldrick spins into a plus in talks with producers

But does NBCU need to pump more cash into Peacock to stay in the race

“Spending more money doesn’t mean you’re going to be more successful,” Strauss says

Strauss believes the branding exercise will be a function of time for Peacock (which, obviously, nods to NBC’s iconic logo)

“We made this strategic decision to not call ourselves ‘NBC Plus,” Strauss says

But at the same time, we called ourselves Peacock, and that gives us permission to create a service that is not exclusive to NBC.”

Using data from the initial Comcast test, reaching 15 million Xfinity X1 and Flex customers, Strauss and the Peacock team have made some adjustments ahead of the broader midsummer launch

Strauss had T-shirts made for the crew with the word “Pivot”— a well-known Shell directive — emblazoned across the back

“Sometimes when you turn on the TV, you just want to watch TV,” Strauss says

“The team hasn’t lost any momentum,” Strauss claims

For the Peacock team, Strauss says, he’s tried to establish a culture of more risk-taking and agility — a philosophy that goes against the grain of the make-sure-not-to-break-anything world of traditional cable