Decoder with Nilay Patel
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?
00:09:59 · Nilay Patel, Matt Strauss
[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? [00:10:18] S5: Well, you know, that that decision really was a decision that was made by Brian Roberts and Mike Kavanaugh. And so candidly, I was not in the room when that decision was made. But I think if you were to ask people at NBCUniversal, it makes strategic sense. [00:10:35] S4: Do you feel that same sense of freedom?
00:10:37 · Matt Strauss
[00:10:37] S5: You know what? I think that there's an energy about people when they show up here, they feel very passionate about what they do. They believe in our strategy. They believe in our portfolio. When you look at NBCUniversal more broadly, like before I was describing the media group, but the media group is one piece of the broader company. You have Universal Film and Television, which has obviously been having an unbelievable summer with The Odyssey, with Obsession. You've got Universal theme parks and experiences. And we opened up Epic Universe last year. We announced we're going to open up a theme park in The UK. We have Sky, which was part of the company, but it was more squarely sat within Comcast cable. And now that's going to migrate over to the new NBCUniversal as part of this restructure. And then you have these media assets, I just spoke about earlier. And so you've got this unbelievable portfolio. And I think that people here really believe in our growth. And that if we are a separate company, it's going to allow us to move faster. It's going to have more clarity around where we want to make capital allocations and decisions. And there's a few areas that really play to our strengths as an organization. One of them is about live sports, live events. I think that that's always been part of NBCUniversal that we're really known for. If you just look at the sports portfolio that we have, we've got NFL, NBA, MLB, Big Ten, Premier League. We've got the Olympics with the IOC. You've got this unbelievable portfolio of sports content. And that's a strategic asset when we're partnering with the leagues because we believe in broadcast. We believe in broad reach. We're not trying to put everything exclusively on a streaming platform. And we've demonstrated across almost every single sport that in 2026, we can actually continue to grow ratings, reach new audiences, which again is something that's becoming more and more complicated.
00:12:39 · Nilay Patel, Matt Strauss
[00:12:39] S4: I ask about that? Because you also run Peacock, is obviously a paid streamer, you can access sports on Peacock. When you say grow ratings on broadcast, are more people putting up antennas to watch sports over the air? [00:12:51] S5: No. What I what I mean, by the way, there are... About 20% of TV households in this country do, still use over the air antennas as [00:13:00] S4: We have lots of listeners who are going to tell you that's the best picture quality you can get.
00:13:03 · Matt Strauss
[00:13:03] S5: Yeah. And it is an amazing picture quality, especially if you live in the right look angle where you could pick up the signal. What I mean is it comes back to what I said earlier about managing as portfolio. And so we don't think of it as broadcast sitting next to a streaming business. We really position ourselves as we are a digital first company trying to get that maximum reach. And so when we look at the ratings, we're combining what you would think of as more of the traditional ratings for linear television with streaming. And all of our digital platforms, whether that's a DVR, whether that's TV everywhere, we aggregate it into one platform. And so when you look at it through that lens, which is just audience, we've actually demonstrated that across almost every sport, NFL, NBA, MLB, the total viewers that we are reaching now, in some cases, are the highest they've been in decades. Even the Super Bowl, which we had earlier this year on NBC, which reached about 137,000,000 viewers at its peak. And that's across, again, all of our platforms. That Super Bowl was the highest rated live event in NBC's one hundred year anniversary, which is this year. Which is, again, it's kind of counterintuitive. But what we're showing is that when we start operating as one, we can reach new audiences. We can aggregate them. And we are demonstrating that not just across sports, even something like the Thanksgiving Day Parade, which has been an institution on NBC also for ninety nine years. This past Thanksgiving Day parade was the highest rated parade we have had in the company's history. And so there's a renaissance happening around live, which in a world of instant gratification, on demand, watch what you want when you want, the fact that you're now seeing this shift of more and more viewers wanting that collective consciousness of social viewing, things that still matter in today's society, that actually plays to our strengths. And we're seeing that manifest itself in higher ratings. But it's also, as I mentioned, a big part of our strategy. It was a big part of Peacock's strategy, which was a bit of an anomaly when we launched Peacock six years ago.