Decoder with Nilay Patel
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.
00:15:21 · Matt Strauss, Nilay Patel
But it's also a huge foundation of what I think NBC does well, is we create these big tentpole events and we're able to shine a light on them and get huge audiences that are continuing to show up even in a world of, you know, fragmentation and cord cutting. [00:15:37] S4: It's interesting that you're... You... You've described it as content first, platform second, and then you're describing your approach to ratings as agnostic to distribution. Right? You're just sort of combining everything and saying this is the number of people we reached.
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.