Decoder with Nilay Patel
00:42:11 · Matt Strauss
It also comes back to who are the audiences we're trying to reach. And one of the things that we've been able to really do is to, we're not trying to cast a broad net and be all things to all people. Like we're not a flea market. We're trying to be very purposeful around how do we super serve the fandoms and the franchises that we think play to our strengths. And so a lot of the decisioning is around how do we grow those audiences? And the decision sciences and research team, I wouldn't say that they are the decision maker, but they are providing us information to make better informed decisions. There's still an art to the science, and so you don't, in my opinion, want to swing the pendulum so far that you're just using data to make predictions. I think that there's a real skill that is around how do you also understand the creative process? But then how do we utilize something like decision sciences and research to make better strategic bets? And I think that that's something that we you're not going get it right every time. But I think that we've done a pretty good job in my opinion in how we've been able to build out our portfolio and predicting where we thought the market was going to go. We predicted that we thought the market was going to move towards bundling. I talked about that in 2019 where I said this great unbundling of cord cutting is likely going to give rise to a great rebundling of streaming. And there was a lot of data that I saw that drew me to that conclusion. And when we were building Peacock, I was not building Peacock to win a streaming war. I was building Peacock for growth after a streaming war. Where do we see them? Where do we think the market was going to be? And if you look at where we are now, where you've got the market that's shifted more towards wholesale bundling, you've got this shift more towards advertising where almost every streaming service is now ad supported with a tier. You've got this real focus now on live events and driving content, whether it's unscripted content or various dayparted content. I would argue that a lot of what streaming looks like today is replicating a broadcast network. A broad household demographic where there's something for everyone in the home that is dual revenue stream and that the market is moving towards bundling.
00:44:38 · Matt Strauss, Nilay Patel
The more you get, the better the price, which is exactly how the cable industry was built. And so everything old is new again. And I think this is like back to the future, but we designed ourselves in a way betting that we thought that that's where the market would go, but equally important, we believe that that would at least play to our strengths, and that's what would work for us at NBCUniversal. [00:45:04] S4: So how do you make decisions? What's your framework?
00:45:04 · Nilay Patel, Matt Strauss
[00:45:04] S4: So how do you make decisions? What's your framework? [00:45:07] S5: Well, my framework is really looking at kind of the hallmarks I mentioned earlier, is how do we drive reach, engagement, and monetization? Those are some of the most critical components. I think that when I project out over the next several years, if there's a streaming war, so to speak, I don't think the streaming war is going to be around subscribers or reach. It's going to be about engagement. It's going to be about how do you grow share of time? How do you grow share of time when there's only twenty four hours in a day, the average consumer spends five to six hours a day consuming mediavideo. That number has been pretty consistent over the past decade. How we consume that media is obviously very different, especially based on where you are demographically. And as more people are spending time, whether it's on social media, on user generated content, on gaming, on podcasting, what are the things that we need to do to continue to grow share of time? Because I know the value of one extra hour per user per month. So a lot of my decisioning is around how do we grow that share of time? Because that's where everything that hangs off of the monetization and the retention and ultimately how I see ourselves continuing to grow as a portfolio.
00:46:37 · S2, S0
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00:48:15 · S1, Nilay Patel, Matt Strauss
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00:49:35 · Matt Strauss, Nilay Patel
[00:49:35] S5: who they are. Okay. [00:49:36] S4: But there's a red company, and there's a a new blue company that just consolidated. They're hypothetical. Yes. The red company is going through some tumult. They were built on we want one extra minute of your time. They were built for the attention economy. They would famously say things like our only competition is sleep. And they've added things like video games and podcasts and it doesn't seem to be working for them. If you ran the red company, what would you do? [00:50:04] S5: Well, I think the red company in my opinion is an incredible company. I think they've done an unbelievable job. [00:50:12] S4: This hypothetical company is doing Well, such a good