Decoder with Nilay Patel
00:15:50 · Matt Strauss
[00:15:50] S5: Yeah, well, like take something like the Milan Cortina Olympics. And so this is an interesting example. If you were to look at that Winter Olympics, we had three thousand two hundred hours roughly of content. And there's no way we can make all of that available on one network. There's just no way to daypart three thousand two hundred hours. And so this is something that similar to what we did in the Paris Olympics, if you remember, we made the decision to make every event available live. Now, when you make it all available live, we put it all on Peacock. And this was a very controversial decision because the question has always historically been, if people tune in to watch this live during the day on Peacock, are they going to tune in to watch NBC primetime? And are we going to cannibalize our ratings? Or are we going to grow the ratings? And this is where we really tested this strategy, which is, well, if we're truly indifferent, then what should happen is that we should be able to expand the funnel during the day, get more people into the Olympics, and really try to create an experience that we're very proud of. We really do believe whether it was the gold zone or whether it was multi view, that we were able to surprise and delight viewers and make it really easy to navigate and find all of the choices on Peacock. But then what happened was that people were tuning in to watch NBC in prime time because there's a difference between what NBC does and what Peacock does. NBC was more about storytelling. It was more about, well, let's talk about what happened today, but what about the backstory of the athletes? Or how's Mike Tirico going to address his perspective on things? And when you back out and say, Okay, well, when you combine these two things together of putting all the content on Peacock and then having the primetime show, this Winter Olympics was about a 96% higher rating. It was about like a 25,000,000 viewers were tuning in to watch the Olympics. Malang Routine Olympics, which is about 96% to 97 higher than Beijing. On the digital side, it was double the digital minutes of every other Winter Olympics combined. And we also doubled the advertising revenue. And so it's a little bit of you've got to be willing to break some glass. And starts with, and this is going to seem so obvious, but it starts with the consumer.
00:18:09 · Matt Strauss
It starts with how do we approach the consumer and give them the best experience. And if you build it, they will come. The only reason I'm using the Olympics as an example is because if you were to look in the past, this was a real pain point where we didn't make everything available on streaming or it was confusing for some viewers to figure out how to navigate all of the choices. And we really as an organization decided to put our shoulder behind this and I think the results ultimately speak for themselves. But again, it ladders back up to this vision of really starting to manage as one portfolio and if you can drive that maximum reach and engagement, that's also gonna be where you're gonna get the best monetization.
00:18:52 · Nilay Patel
[00:18:52] S4: The Verge team in particular was addicted to Gold Zone, which was the whip around coverage of every every metal event. It was very fun. Let me ask you about this. A big Decoder trope is that your distribution fundamentally affects what you make. Right? That the medium is essentially the message, and I know what a YouTuber makes because they're on YouTube, and I know what a TikToker makes because they're on TikTok. And I could stretch this all the way back to saying, I know what broadcast TV looks like because the medium of broadcast TV has fundamentally shaped the content that gets made there, and I know what cable shows on Bravo look like. And they're not the same thing, and they haven't been for a while. You're describing, okay. We're gonna bring programming in. We're gonna centralize that. We're gonna be agnostic to distribution or indifferent, I think, is the word you used. And that's gonna increase viewership. But the the pressure of the different distributions is still there. Right? Running the broadcast network over the air is still different and reaches different people than distributing on YouTube TV than running Peacock as a paid platform unto itself. How do you manage that tension? Because it it is real.
00:19:58 · Matt Strauss
[00:19:58] S5: It is very real. It's a really insightful question. So the tension is real, but actually I don't view it as tension. I actually view it as an opportunity. Because you've got different audiences in some cases. Like if it's a Venn diagram and you look at who's the audience on broadcast versus the audience on cable versus the audience on streaming, there's some overlap, but it's actually not as much as you would think. And so that actually speaks to this broader strategy, which is, well, how do we reach? If we reach all these different viewers, but they're on different platforms, how do we start kind of bringing this together into one? Now, there's multiple ways to effectuate that kind of a strategy. One is you start sharing content and window content differently across platforms. So for example, we have a show on Peacock called The Paper, is Greg Daniels created it, who also created The Office. And it's a really great comedy, and it's an original. And if you were to look at how streaming services typically make originals available, they're exclusive. You premiere it on your streaming platform and it stays on that platform forever, typically. Well, what we're starting to experiment with is, well, what if we premiere the paper on Peacock, but then six months later, we then introduce it onto NBC. Now you're bringing a show that was created for streaming. You're making it available on NBC to a new audience. But then you also have this added message, which is if you wanna watch next week's episode now, go get Peacock. And now all of a sudden, NBC is not only reaching new audiences, but it's becoming a sales channel for how we can then drive people back and
00:21:37 · Nilay Patel
[00:21:37] S4: sign up for Greg Daniels. This is the thing that I... The feedback loop of a YouTuber is so blunt. As I've made, like, a handful of Instagram Reels in my life, and I literally open and look at the retention chart and think, oh, I should put another hook in there in the middle to keep my viewers. And it's, like, immediate. It's... That's not even how my brain works, and it's immediate that the data makes you think this way. If you say to Greg Daniels, hey. Make sure episode two of The Office ends on a cliffhanger so that I can advertise you can go watch the next episode right away on Peacock.
00:22:11 · Matt Strauss
[00:22:11] S5: Yeah. So, well, Donna Langley, who oversees all of the entertainment programming, she would be the one calling Greg Daniels and giving and giving him that feedback. But here would be maybe a different way to answer that question. I don't think that we're necessarily trying to change the framework of how some of the shows are being created on NBC or on Peacock because there's still something about premium content and how that's being created that I think resonates with a lot of a lot of people. But here's what we're thinking differently, is, okay, take a show like SNL, which we had the fifty year anniversary for SNL, a couple of years ago, which is unbelievable what Lorne Michaels has created. You still have SNL that's on 11:30, PM Eastern Time. But what if we now take that content and we format it for vertical video on Peacock? We know that there's a whole cohort of people because of TikTok or Reels that they're watching on their phone. They're likely holding it vertically. They're likely using their forefinger or their thumb to navigate. They're watching a show like SNL on YouTube in some cases as well. Well, instead of trying to recreate or tell viewers how to watch the content, why don't we just take that content and reformat it in a way that's more akin to them? And so now you can go to Peacock and you can watch content in a vertical video format. That may not be for you, but it might be for somebody else where they want to swipe sketch to sketch to sketch because that's how they enjoy it. Or let me give you another example, which is sports. I mentioned earlier how we try to introduce new features around sports because it's such a passionate fandom. And you can't change the way somebody watches an NBA game. People want to watch an NBA game in the way that it's being produced. But the lines are getting blurred around what's a live event and what's a video game, especially if you grew up playing NBA two ks. And so we now introduce something called Performance View, which is on Peacock. So you can watch the NBA game or you can enable Performance View. If you enable Performance View, an overlay comes on top of the game. And now it looks like a video game where we're pulling in real time sports data from Sportradar. We're calculating the probability of somebody making a shot.