Though it's behind a paywall The Information has an interesting article up on NBC/Universal claiming that the Peacock is performing poorly and that several executives have been talking up a possible merger with the likes of WarnerMedia in the next couple of years.
The article apparently says that before Jeff Shell took charge of NBC/Universal he was telling colleagues that they "would need to" merge with another big media player like WarnerMedia in order to achieve the scale needed to really compete in the streaming wars.
As Netflix and Disney cement their leads over an array of rivals in the video-streaming market, top executives at Comcast and its NBCUniversal arm are in a quandary. Only 11.3 million households regularly watch NBCU's Peacock service, far fewer than use competing services, according to recent internal data viewed by The Information. NBCU wants to ramp up Peacock's growth, particularly among paying users, but without spending a lot of money.
The data also suggests that Peacock's priciest $9.99 tier that doesn't carry ads only drew 4% of people signing up to use Peacock. Most viewers watch either the free tier or the $5 a month tier with some ads.
So basically Comcast boasted that they had 33 million
sign-ups but only a third of them are actually watching the service regularly and of those sign-ups less than 1.5 million seem to have signed up for the 'premium', ad free tier.
While I obviously cannot confirm those numbers I had heard before Xmas that Peacock were telling producers coming in to pitch and what have you that they were really only in the market for 'cheaper' half hour comedies and reality shows because they saw most of the growth in the platform in its ad free tier so they were working to lower margins.
I imagine that they'll still produce 'big swings' for Peacock from Universal but, as the article says, they are clearly working to a much lower budget than anyone else because they don't want to detract from their cable business (what there is of it) and a reliance on the ad supported free tier.
As Netflix and Disney cement their leads over an array of rivals in the video-streaming market, top executives at Comcast and its NBCUniversal arm are in a quandary. Only 11.3 million households regularly watch NBCU’s Peacock service, far fewer than use competing services, according to recent ...
www.theinformation.com
Man, that feels like a HUGE loss for Sony. While there is always churn when it comes to studio's and their various talent deals it feels like Sony loose two or three big deals for everyone one that they manage to bring in to replace them. I imagine it's a mix of aggressive cost cutting at Sony (yes, still) and the fact that it can be harder for an 'indie' studio like Sony to really big swings set up at emerging platforms or even get good deals.
deadline.com
