Decoder with Nilay Patel
00:00:00 · S0, S1, S2, S3
[00:00:00] S0: Support for the show comes from Engine. Travel tech from the eighties got us this far, but it's about time someone rebuilt it for the modern era. That's what Engine has done over the past eight years, building strong hotel partnerships, proprietary supply, real time rate shopping, and payment rails. That kind of infrastructure work simply can't be bought. Today, that foundation runs travel for nearly 40,000 businesses and 2,000,000 travelers, and it's growing 60% a year. Intelligent travel, the future of business travel runs on engine. Learn more at engine.com/decoder. [00:00:38] S1: Support for the show comes from CrowdStrike. It's not a huge stretch to say that AI is the next major computing platform. Every platform shift changes the way we build software, and it changes security, too. CrowdStrike is defining cybersecurity in the AI era with detection and response, or AIDR, a solution for seeing, monitoring, and securing AI across the enterprise. Learn more about how leading companies are turning to CrowdStrike to secure AI and secure their business at crowdstrike.com/decoder. [00:01:13] S2: Great meeting. Who took notes? Anyone? [00:01:17] S3: With Monday Notetaker, nobody has to take notes again. It joins your call, transcribes it, and turns the whole conversation into a clear plan. Action items, owners, deadlines, all right there on your monday.com board, ready for the team. So the meeting ends, and the plan already exists. Meetings aren't just talk anymore. Go to monday.com, the AI Workspace platform.
00:01:44 · Nilay Patel
[00:01:44] S4: Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking to Matt Strauss, is now chairman of the NBCUniversal Media Group. Matt was first on the show about two years ago, and a lot has changed at NBCU since then, including his title. First, Comcast spun off most of the NBCU cable channels into something called Versant. That's CNBC and MS Now plus some others. That's when Matt's role changed from heading up Peacock plus some other streaming services to heading up the whole thing across all of NBC's distribution including broadcast and cable. Now, Comcast is in the process of spinning off NBCU entirely, really which the first time NBC has been independent in essentially forever. That's a lot to have going on all at once. And meanwhile, it's only just this year that Peacock became a profitable business at all, and it's still pretty far away from being anything like the juggernaut of Netflix. But if you've been paying attention to entertainment industry recently, you'll know that Netflix is going through it. Its numbers are down and it's brought in new people to lead content in order to try to recapture the audience. You'll hear Matt say that he's always been betting on this moment. When streamers started to rebundle into something that looked like cable and audiences turned to live events like sports more often. You're gonna hear him talk about sports a lot actually. Sports held up the cable industry for years. They held up broadcasts and now they're the thing that can make streaming a winner for NBC. This conversation was a fun one. I always enjoy talking to Matt and he's clearly very confident about where NBCU is headed. Things before we start. One, we used to always disclose that NBCUniversal was an investor in The Verge's parent company, but that's no longer true. That stake now belongs to Versant. Two, you're gonna hear me ask Matt about the red company and the blue company. That's just my way of getting Matt to talk about Netflix and Skydance, company that now owns Paramount and Warner Brothers. I think he did a good job playing along. Before we get going, do me a favor and subscribe to Decoder on YouTube where we put out new episodes every Monday and Thursday. Okay. Matt Strauss, chairman of the NBCUniversal Media Group. Here we go.
00:03:47 · Nilay Patel, Matt Strauss
Matt Strauss, you are the chairman of the NBCUniversal Media Group. Welcome back to Decoder. [00:03:52] S5: Thank you so much, Nilay. It's great to be back. [00:03:54] S4: I am very excited to talk to you. There's a lot going on in the media. It is a tumultuous time in Hollywood. I have to tell the audience, you and I are speaking, like, minutes after Anthropic filed. It's s one, and all of humanity is gonna be turned into AI. Who knows what entertainment we'll be watching in the future? There's a lot going on. Let's start at the very beginning of this. You have a new job since last time you were on the show. Last time you on the show, you were the head of direct to consumer, which you were the head of Peacock, basically, and the other apps inside the family. Now you're the chairman of NBCUniversal Media Group. Yes. What's the new job? What does that mean?
00:04:28 · Matt Strauss
[00:04:28] S5: Well, so NBC Media Group is really, it's comprised of certain services within NBC. It's the broadcast network. It's Bravo. It's Peacock. It's NBC Sports. We also have NBC News and Telemundo. And I think one of the things that we recognized, especially when we spun off some of our cable assets, last year into Versant was that the assets that we had truly worked better together. NBC really has been like a megaphone. It's been incredibly strategic in how we've been able to grow Peacock just given the reach of NBC, which is a bit ironic because I think so many people believe that broadcasting was a bit of a relic of the past in this digital world, but it's actually proven to be the opposite. That as things have gotten fragmented, having a broadcast network is actually a superpower because we're continuing to see ratings growth. And that has been really helpful as we've been building out Peacock. But Peacock actually also was finding new audiences. Cord cutters or people who maybe didn't even grow up watching NBC or some of our cable networks. And so Peacock's also been really strategic in how we've been able to reach and drive people back to NBC and Bravo. And so that flywheel, I think, is where we recognize that we need to start operating differently. And I've been a huge advocate of really what I like to call centers of excellence in how I like to structure the business, which is platform first content first, I'm sorry, platform second. How do we get maximum reach, maximum engagement? And that really required us thinking differently about how we were running the business. And we essentially, instead of having a programming group within broadcast and a programming group within streaming, we just collapsed the business. And so now you've got one programming team, one marketing team, one product and technology team, one decision sciences and research team, one obviously, advertising team. And they're all incentivized around just how do we continue to grow the portfolio, again, that maximum reach, maximum engagement, continue to drive top line revenue. And I think that that structure, has really, something that we put in place about eighteen months ago. I think that is contributing to a lot of the success that we're seeing now. And so like even if you look at 2026, NBC is the number one network in total viewers.
00:06:58 · Matt Strauss
We had an unbelievable early part of the year with Legendary February, which you might remember. That's when we had the Super Bowl and the Milan Cortina Olympics and the NBA All Star Game. In seventeen days, we reached over two twenty five million viewers. This summer, we had Love Island, which was the number one show of the summer for streaming. You had the World Cup, which was the number one Spanish language, sporting event in US history on Telemundo in Peacock. We had a show called Five Star Weekend, which was our number one scripted drama. And now, you know, we led ourselves into the fall where we've had, you know, Sunday Night Football, which has been the number one show for fifteen consecutive years. We had a great, kickoff, you know, over 25,000,000 viewers. We just had the NBA tip-off last week with the Knicks and the Sixers, which is the number one rated tip-off in NBA history. And so it does feel like we're firing on all cylinders and how we're trying to really operate in this, again, in this kind of content first platform second mantra. But what's also really important just to kind of go one level deeper is a big part of this strategy is how do we move audiences across platforms. And so for example, when I mentioned that Love Island was the number one streaming show of the summer, 40% of those Love Island viewers also tuned in to watch the World Cup. And so migrating viewers back and forth across the portfolio is a critical part to how we see ourselves continuing to grow. But to do that, to effectuate that, you need to structure yourself in a way where people are incentivized along that vision. And I think that we're still kind of evolving as an organization. But I'm really proud of some of the milestones and accomplishments that we've made as a team. And I love my job. I feel like I've got the best job in the industry at the moment.
00:08:57 · Nilay Patel, Matt Strauss
[00:08:57] S4: Yeah. It is a tumultuous time in Hollywood and you seem like one of the happiest people in the industry right at the second. That's... That is very notable. You're a Decoder pro. You brought up structure. I'm dying to ask you about the decision sciences group. That's the other question I ask everybody. But let me just back out for one second. You're describing quite a lot of freedom in rethinking how something like NBC would work. And you mentioned the Versant spin. So that's CNBC and MS Now and a bunch of channels went that way. I'm on their networks all the time. I would describe the folks at Versant as feeling more free. Right? They're like, they're disconnected from the the battleship that was Comcast and NBCU. They can go try whatever they wanna try. They're energized by it in some ways. Then Comcast looked at NBCU and said, okay. We're gonna spin off NBCU as well. And we're gonna be the cable business, and NBCU will be an entertainment business. And now you're in charge of that. You're, like, a twenty year Comcast veteran. I think you got your start doing cable boxes. [00:09:56] S5: Yep. I started in 2004 at Comcast. [00:09:59] S4: So just tell me about that process of... Alright. We spun off CNBC and MS Now and Versant. Now we're looking at this company. We ought to spin off NBCU as well. And just tell me about how that came out. What was that moment like? Y'all sit in a boardroom? Did it did it come down from on high? How did that happen?