Peacock boss Matt Strauss has plans to keep you streaming

Today, I’m talking with Matt Strauss, who is the president of direct-to-consumer at NBCUniversal. That’s a large fancy title that means Matt’s in charge of Peacock and all another streaming video offering the company has worldwide. That includes everything from Fandango and its Fandango at Home service — which utilized to be Vudu — to Rotten Tomatoes to the core platform that powers the Now tv service run by Sky in Europe.

That’s a lot, and all of that is under the overall ownership of Comcast, which is in the mediate of its own massive transition as its conventional cable tv business continues to fade away. Matt actually spent almost 2 decades at Comcast working on its cable products before switching over to NBCU, and I was truly curious in his view on how the economics of the tv business will shake out as almost everyone moves to streaming.

Matt besides oversees the global streaming platform that Peacock and another services at NBCU run on, and I wanted to know that large tech investment is generating the kind of economies of scale that truly pay off over time — stuff that tech companies think about all the time, but media companies have had to learn.

One thing I truly wanted to talk to Matt about was how Peacock handled the Olympics this year — it felt like things truly clicked for the platform in Paris over the summer, and the thought that all the coverage could be served up in multiple different formats on request and live truly worked. It turns out that quite a few these ideas have been brewing for a long time — for a decade or more in any cases.

There’s a lot in this 1 — tech, media, sports, and culture, all at once. It’s rather a ride.

Our usual disclosure before we start — NBCU is an investor in The Verge’s parent company, Vox Media, but they have no control over our newsroom, and I stay free to request NFL games in 4K HDR of their executives on my show whenever I want. You’re on the hook now, Matt.

Okay, Matt Strauss, head of direct-to-consumer at NBCUniversal. Here we go.

This transcript has been lightly edited for dimension and clarity.

Matt Strauss, you are the president of direct-to-consumer at NBCUniversal. Welcome to Decoder.

Thank you, Nilay. It’s good to be here.

That is simply a very formal title. It sounds like you sit in a leather chair in a boardroom and just kind of issue edicts. What it means to me is that you oversee Peacock. Is that truly the scope of it?

It’s a small bit broader than that. To give you a small bit of background, I actually have just celebrated my 20-year anniversary at Comcast, and so I’ve been at the company for rather a long time. And erstwhile I came to Comcast, I actually came there as cable was transitioning from analog to digital, and it gave way to the two-way connectivity that yet built things like on-demand. On-demand technology is something I’ve been very passionate about my full career and was truly focused on how I built that out for Comcast and spent rather a number of years doing that.

We yet launched the X1 platform, which was Comcast’s IP set-top box, due to the fact that we realized that the future was on-demand that was going to give people instant gratification, and we needed a platform to let people eventual control, that they could navigate all these on-demand choices, and X1 became the platform where we did that. And it truly was ahead of its time due to the fact that it aggregated live and on-demand and DVR and even apps and made them all truly seamless for consumers, including the ability to navigate them with your voice with the voice remote, which was before even Siri and Alexa — like we were experimenting with voice.

I think as my career there kind of grew and I took on more of the function of overseeing the residential services at Comcast, which included video and broadband and phone, I got a call 1 day to come to NBC, which evidently is simply a subsidiary of Comcast, and I got a call from Steve Burke, who at the time was the CEO, and he had asked if I would come there to aid them build a streaming service and take it to market, and I got that call on a Thursday, and on Monday, I showed up in fresh York City with my suitcase, and I was ready to go. And what’s very common inside of large companies in my experience is that erstwhile you’re trying to build something new, it’s common to almost incubate it. You kind of make resources. You put a small bit of a barrier around it due to the fact that you don’t want the day-to-day activity necessarily interfering with the ambition of trying to build a fresh business, and Peacock was the same inside of NBC.

What I realized early on was that there’s lots of another businesses within NBC that actually are very complimentary and can aid get us more scale, can aid de-risk the execution and the ambition we had with Peacock, for example. NBC owns Fandango, which is 1 of the largest ticketing companies. They own Voodoo, which is now called Fandango at Home, which has a catalog of 250,000 titles for digital acquisition and rental. They own Rotten Tomatoes, which is surely known for movie and tv reviews. They besides — everyone’s acquainted with NBC and quite a few the cable networks that we have in the United States, but NBC distributes their networks in almost all country around the world.

We recognized that if we could aggregate all of these businesses under 1 portfolio, it actually could give us even more economies of scale, and that’s what we started to do. And so the umbrella of direct-to-consumers, Peacock is surely a large part of it, but all these another businesses — the global businesses and these another digital businesses — now sit under this D2C umbrella, and they each have their own individual P&Ls, but in the aggregate, they scope 100 million users, they make billions of dollars of revenue, and they also… they’re available in over 70 countries around the world. I think that that is the portfolio that I’m now managing. How we then leverage that portfolio is something that I’ve been trying to build out over the last fewer years around again, trying to build 1 product team, 1 technology team, 1 decision sciences investigation team, etc., to give us kind of these centers of excellence inside of NBC as we proceed to rotation out our digital plans for direct-to-consumer.

You’re on Decoder, so I’m absolutely going to ask you about how all of that is structured and how all of those individual P&Ls fight for resources. But I want to just take 1 step back and focus on the transition you mentioned from Comcast to NBC to direct-to-consumer.

In the tv world, we’re broadly going from a place where large cable companies like Comcast or Spectrum or whatever had large regional physical infrastructure monopolies. You had these natural monopolies due to the fact that you had wires in the ground going to everyone’s houses. You were the distributor, the video providers would come to you and you would resell those services, and that was a beautiful good business for everyone.

Now we’re at a place where there’s multiple ways to get programming over the internet, whether it’s wireless, whether it’s fibre in the ground, whether it’s inactive the cable network, whether it’s other forms of broadband like Starlink, and the distributors don’t have as much power over the suppliers due to the fact that the suppliers can get to consumers in lots of different ways. That’s the transition that you’re mentioning, and it has truly disrupted the full industry. How do you see Peacock fitting into this at the end? Is it going to be as good of a business as the cable business was erstwhile upon a time? due to the fact that it feels like everyone is searching for a business that good.

There’s no question that the cable business is simply a good business and continues to be a good business. I think to answer the question, you almost request to look at it through the lens of the consumer. And what I’ve learned is there truly are different cohorts of how people consume video, how they subscribe to video.

So, for example, the cable client tends to watch quite a few TV. The average consumer watches about 5 hours a day; if you subscribe to cable, you typically watch that much, if not more. And there’s quite a few benefit of having cable because, as I mentioned, if you have the X1 platform, there’s a simplicity of just having all the choices in 1 place. It works with 99.99 percent reliability. In many cases, people are besides subscribing to the bundle, so they’re getting video, but then they’re besides getting internet, and in any cases, they’re getting their wireless. And even though people tend to say they like a la carte, bundling has quite a few virtue due to the fact that the more you take, the better the price. People who subscribe to cable and satellite today, it’s not that they’re not aware of another choices — they’re paying in any cases, for that convenience in that reliability. They besides tend to over index in subscribing to streaming services. It’s not 1 or the other. In many cases, you’re seeing that client buying both. That’s 1 part of the market.

You have another part of the market, which might be more price sensitive, possibly does not consume as much video. In any cases, they might watch video, but they might be spending more time on social media or video gaming or how else they’re occupying their time, and they like the flexibility of being able to subscribe to a subset of services. And in many ways, that’s what direct-to-consumer is offering.

There is simply a Venn diagram, though, here, where as a media company, you want to cast a broad adequate net where you’re providing a value proposition for 1 segment, which is like the content carnivore but, at the same time, offering the optionality, and in any cases, with direct-to-consumer, but in many cases, there’s an overlap between the two. erstwhile you look at it as a portfolio, which is truly how we manage the business in NBC, it’s not direct-to-consumer sits outside of the broadcast and the linear and the cable networks; it’s actually all 1 group, and we manage it as a portfolio. And there’s examples where that comes to life like the Olympics, but I think that we are kind of looking at it in totality and that it’s about giving customers choice and options, and that’s how we see ourselves growing. If pay-TV declines and cord cutting grows, we inactive want to service the customers who have paid TV, but at the same time, we admit that the growth over the next foreseeable future is going to proceed to come from direct-to-consumer.

The last time I was a Comcast client was 15 years ago. I lived in Chicago, and everyone I knew was a Comcast customer. That was the choice in my building and most of the neighborhoods that my friends lived in. We all besides got net from Comcast due to what you’re describing — the bundle. There was not another thing; it was just the easiest next thing to do.

When you describe direct-to-consumer, that’s another distribution method, right? You’re going virtually straight to the consumer and charging them money and then giving them services directly, and you manage the client relationship. Is that the part that’s going to grow, versus the experience I had erstwhile I was a Comcast client and I would watch NBC 5 in Chicago, but Comcast owned the relation with me?

I think erstwhile you kind of survey the pay-TV ecosystem and the trajectory of pay-TV, I think it’s consistently been declining year over year, and I don’t think anybody truly knows at what point does it start to flatten out? But I do believe that there’s always going to be a reasonably large group of people who are willing to pay a premium for cable for all the reasons that I said before. And so I think that’s inactive going to be a very, very large part of the tv viewing and tv households viewing. But yes, I mean, direct-to-consumer is where we’re truly projecting the growth to come from.

I actually think that there’s quite a few signs of what I’ve learned in the cable business that I see happening in the direct-to-consumer business that, in any ways, it’s going to be, I think, back to the future. And what I mean by that is that people who possibly did cut the cord, part of the rationale I believe was due to the fact that they thought they were going to save money by going and just getting any streaming services. And to a certain extent, that was actual for any period of time, but it was very predictable that the cost of content hasn’t gone down, the cost of sports rights haven’t gone down. It was inevitable that prices of streaming services were going to gotta increase. And we’ve seen that as an manufacture over the past 18 to 24 months, where streaming services have continued to take their rates up in an effort to drive more profitability. By the way, we’re not excluded from that. I mean, we took a price increase over the summer. I think that that was a very predictable outcome.

The another predictable outcome, from my point of view, is what I said earlier, which is people watch more video than they truly know. If you look at the Nielsen numbers, the amount of time that people spend watching video has been reasonably consistent over the past decade. If you cut the cord and you sign up for a streaming service, you’re improbable going to get your video calories as a consumer from 1 service. What happens is you subscribe to two, three, and now the average consumer is subscribing to 4 or 5 services.

You take these 2 things together, where I’m subscribing now to 4 or 5 services, the rates are continuing to go up. In any cases, you may be asking yourself: Wait, I might be paying more and possibly getting little than what I got erstwhile I subscribed to cable. And I think that these are the ingredients in the marketplace that is driving the marketplace to bundling. And we had talked about this, I had talked about this 5 years ago that we’re likely going to see an detonation of streaming and direct-to-consumer, only to then find it almost reaggregate itself under a fresh bundle. And I think there’s evidently quite a few evidence over the last 2 years where that’s precisely what’s been happening.

And I think that, so again, in many ways, it doesn’t change the fact that you’re going to inactive have people who subscribe to cable or streaming or both, but I think that direct-to-consumer is going to be a very crucial component, but I think increasingly direct-to-consumer, and direct-to-consumer as part of a bundling construct, is going to likely be how many people over time are subscribing to these different services, which, again, is ironically back to where everything started with cable television.

Are you seeing the growth in the bundling, and are you able to keep the client relation as the bundles grow? I’m reasoning specifically of my client relation with your competitor, Max, which is someway to this day inactive mediated by my AT&T account due to the fact that I’m an AT&T subscriber, and I don’t think they remembered that they spun the company out. So, I inactive have Max through AT&T, and it’s actually rather confusing, right? due to the fact that I can’t adjust that account, and whatever, I’m just going to leave it alone. Are you seeing that kind of thing play out as you bundle, as you go out to market, that individual else is owning the client for you?

It’s a good question. We might be a small bit unique due to the fact that we actually do not have that much bundling. The majority of our subscriber base is direct-to-consumer, and we have been very disciplined in how we’ve tried to grow the subscriber base.

Peacock launched in 2020, and at the time, the marketplace was truly focused on on-demand, scripted dramas, binge-viewing, and ad-free. Most services were chasing that section of the market. We came to marketplace late, if we’re being honest about it, but 1 of the benefits of coming to a marketplace late is you could measure the white space and where you see opportunity. We believe the chance for us was to position Peacock in the premium ad-supported space and not just kind of focus on premium scripted dramas and movies and on-demand, even though that is simply a part of the programming strategy, but it was besides about live sports and live news and unscripted programming and multicultural programming.

Playing to the strengths of what we do as a company, as a broadcast company, which was to mark a broad household demographic. And the strategy there was that if we anchored ourselves in that place, then we’re not straight competing with another streamers — we’re more complementary. It was about completeness and, in any ways, being like the best of cable tv for a comparatively affordable price. We besides believed that the future was not just going to be on-demand, even though on-demand is simply a core part of the way we consume television. But that linear and live, which quite a few people, 4 years ago, were saying was dead, that was just nonsense. That’s why erstwhile we launched Peacock, we wanted to have both linear networks. We launched with dozens of linear channels. We launched with a library of 80,000 hours, or we’ve grown the library to over 80,000 hours of programming.

We were besides very intentional about it being ad-supported due to the fact that a dual gross stream from our point of view was better than a single gross stream. And this is besides core competency for what we do at NBC with having a very strong ad sales squad and deep relationships with different advertisers. And we went to marketplace with 5 minutes of ads per hour, which, again, was a very controversial thing to do at the time, but that’s given us an advantage due to the fact that it’s besides allowed us to focus on how do we innovate on the advertising beyond 15 and 30 second spots due to the fact that it’s been core to our DNA from the beginning? And the only reason I’m giving you all this context is that erstwhile we built the service with that intent, it truly was different in the market. The vast majority of people who signed up for Peacock signed up directly, with the exception of Comcast. We did do a bundling deal with Comcast, and they presently do wholesale Peacock with certain of their packages like high-end gig broadband subscribers, but the overwhelming majority of our sub base is direct-to-consumer.

Now, to answer your question, though, as the marketplace moves more and more toward bundling, I do see that becoming an increasingly larger condition of our subscriber base. And again, taking the past lesson from what we know about bundling, the 1 thing that arguably has always held the bundle together has been sports. And sports, knowing this, coming from that side of the business, if you remember, erstwhile we launched Peacock, it was expected to be around the Tokyo Olympics. Live sports was always fundamental to our strategy, and we’ve been aggregating live sports and sports rights reasonably consistently since we’ve launched Peacock, with real intent and intention, knowing that not only is sports going to be a driver of acquisition, which has proven to be actual for us, but that sports is going to be an crucial component that if the marketplace does decision to bundling, that not only will we solidify our place in that bundle. But equally important, if not more important, is that you get the right wholesale economics around how you’re positioned in that bundle.

And so we feel like we’re in a truly good position based on the trajectory that we’re on, but if the marketplace does decision more toward bundling, we besides feel like we’re well positioned to be included in that kind of packaging. But I don’t think it’s going to take distant from direct-to-consumer. I just think, for us, it’s going to proceed to augment the subscriber base that we presently have.

Can I just unpack the phrase “wholesale economics” in a somewhat more Machiavellian way? What you’re describing is: you’re going to have the sports that everybody wants, so erstwhile the bundles go out to market, you will charge a higher rate or take a higher percent of the rate people pay inside the bundle, right? This is classically ESPN and the cable companies. ESPN got the highest carriage rate of any of the cable companies. Right? This is what you’re describing?

Well, I’m describing price value, and there’s a advanced value on sports, and that’s evidently manifesting itself erstwhile you just look at sports rights and the price that sports rights are going for in the market. Essentially, yes, I mean, yes to your question, that we see ourselves… I mean, if you look at Peacock just as an example, we have more live sports than any another streaming service. erstwhile you look at the NFL, the Premier League, large 10, the Olympics, evidently the NBA, that’s coming to Peacock later next year. And over the course of a year, we have any live sports 300 of 365 days. We didn’t get there by accident. We got there through real intention. We’ve had a very consistent strategy and imagination from the beginning. And I think what you’re just seeing is us executing against that strategy.

We would say internally like, look, this is not a sprint — it’s a marathon. possibly at a sprinter’s pace due to the fact that evidently the market’s moving very quickly, but we’re fortunate to be part of a much broader diversified company at Comcast, with a elder management squad that believes in our vision, in our strategy. And that’s allowed us to not do things like pursuit low value subs or do wholesale bundling deals without the right economical relationships. And I think it’s positioned us in a really, truly good way going forward due to the fact that we don’t feel like we gotta do things artificially just to grow our sub base. We want to grow subs at the right RPU (revenue per subscriber), at the right level of engagement, and build a subscriber base in the right way. And that’s fundamentally what we’ve been doing, and we haven’t wavered from that strategy or that imagination from the beginning.

You described the different segments of the audience, right? There are any people who inactive have conventional MVPD subscriptions, and just, they’ve got a satellite box or a cable box or whatever, and there’s another people who are watching TikTok all day. I would section them differently. I think you’ve got older customers and younger customers, and the younger customers will almost surely never sign up for a conventional multichannel cable bundle kind thing, right? erstwhile you think about that split, that has a timeline on it, right? You’re going to lose older customers at any rate and hopefully gain younger customers at a faster rate. Are those lines going to sync up on time? Do you see the growth in the younger client offsetting the decline in the older customer?

Because erstwhile you talk about the decline of pay-TV, conventional pay-TV, it’s getting faster is what everybody tells me.

The decline in pay-TV isn’t… I mean, this may sound crude — it’s not just due to the fact that older people are passing away. I mean, any of it is people at all ages are making decisions where they might feel like it’s more valuable where they want to just cut the cord, so to speak, and get streaming services, and you could be at any age to do that. But to answer your more broad question, yes. I mean, that is fundamentally the strategy, which is why Peacock exists within NBCUniversal — we see the pay-TV business inactive being a very good business. It inactive is simply a very profitable business for our company. And we’ve built truly strong brands in the pay-TV ecosystem that streaming is simply a way for us to kind of drive more growth and offset that decline and yet become the broader growth engine for the company.

But as I mentioned before, I think sometimes, it’s interpreted that legacy networks are someway like dinosaurs and that that’s not truly where people are spending quite a few time. I see it very, very differently. I see it as a strength. erstwhile you have a broadcast network and you could do something like the Olympics and you’re averaging over 30 million viewers a day, that actually becomes a immense promotional vehicle for you to besides drive awareness and audience for your streaming service. erstwhile you have networks like Bravo with truly deep fandoms and you can get into that fandom on a streaming service by launching, by making any of that content available to cord cutters, it creates a small bit of an infinity loop where linear networks and pay-TV can drive audience to streaming and awareness for streaming. And vice versa — streaming can drive people back to linear.

Another example of this would be a show like Yellowstone. Not everybody may be aware, but we have the exclusive rights to stream Yellowstone on Peacock. erstwhile we licensed Yellowstone, it was not the number 1 show on television, which is part of the reason why we got the rights to it due to the fact that we took a bet that we thought it was a truly good show. But that show was on Paramount Network, which is simply a cable network on various tiers of cable. It’s not even a basic cable network. And what happened there, I think reasonably predictably due to the fact that it is an excellent show, is that people were uncovering it on streaming due to the fact that we are the exclusive home for it. They were then catching up as the show progressed in its seasons, and then they were tuning back in to watch the fresh season, in any cases on Paramount Network, and then that was driving people back to Peacock where possibly they wanted to watch it from the beginning or they wanted to catch up. And it became this truly interesting infinity loop.

This is the same thing that happened with Breaking Bad erstwhile it was available on AMC and another streaming service, or Mad Men. So, I look at it very differently. I look at it as this is simply a strength and, if we can figure out ways to proceed programming these different platforms, that they can proceed to drive the audiences in a way that becomes a differentiator and a growth engine for us. And again, it goes back to why we’ve organized ourselves in the way that we have, which is to truly think of it as a portfolio.

Two things. One, I appreciate that you won’t name your competitors — very good. You’re talking about Netflix. Two, I could talk to you for the remainder of our time about Yellowstone and whether the Dutton household is rich or not, which is profoundly confusing as that show goes on. I just want to be clear. They have a helicopter, but then they request to sale the… It’s very confusing.

They can’t pay for the gas.

It’s so confusing. It’s a large show. I truly could just talk about Yellowstone for the remainder of the time.

You’ve talked a lot about being the place where the client goes all day, beginning the app all day, having the relationship. quite a few what you’re talking about is being the interface for television, but Peacock has to run on devices from Apple and Roku and Google and whoever else, on Samsung TVs. All of those companies, they want a part of your ad sales; they want a part of your subscription revenue. What are those relationships like? Are they in your way? Are they something that you’re just handling? Are they not on your mind?

Well, no. I think, look, erstwhile you’re looking at delivering a streaming service, we evidently request to be available on all single platform and device, but the majority of video consumption is inactive on the television, and so these distributor relationships are truly important. I think we have truly good relationships with all the different partners. You even saw that in the Olympics. Like Roku, for example, built a fantastic interface to advance the Olympics. Apple and Amazon did a truly large occupation promoting. I’m not trying to name-drop any circumstantial platform, but I think we’ve got the right business relation where they’re incentivized to sale Peacock and participate in our growth, and we benefit besides from the placement.

What I meant erstwhile I said frequency and habituation is, I think of it as, how often, Nilay, do you usage your phone? And I could tell you the average consumer uses their telephone or looks at their telephone 2 to 300 times a day, and you most likely never turn off your phone. I know for me, it’s the first thing I look at in the morning, it’s the last thing I look at at night. I even usage it as my alarm clock. I never turn off my phone. Now, think about your TV. Well, you most likely turn on your tv erstwhile you want to watch it, and you possibly do that a couple of times a day. And then what do you do? You turn it off.

I’m looking at it differently and saying, what do you request to do where individual never wants to turn off their tv and they want to open up our app all single day? That, to me, is the ambition I’m challenging my squad to think through. That influences decisions we’re making around, that’s a very different dynamic around how you program and manage a service, if that’s your ambition. But that’s where I think we request to go as a streaming platform. And the closest example might be a show like Love Island, which was a immense hit for us over the summer. That show was on 5 days a week, and so that evidently required you, if you were watching that show, to tune in 5 days a week. And that is part of the habituation and frequency that I was referring to that I don’t think is truly discussed a lot erstwhile people are evaluating streaming services.

Let me ask you any of the Decoder questions now due to the fact that I think we’ve led up to them beautiful directly. NBCUniversal is simply a large company — you’ve got a broadcast division, you’ve got a sports division. These are old, celebrated groups inside the company. How is your group organized within NBCUniversal?

Right now, we are all part of the same group, which reports into Mark Lazarus. And Mark Lazarus oversees all tv and streaming. Initially, it was like Peacock was like its own separate entity, end-to-end — own programming, own marketing, own support services like HR and legal, etc. Everything was kind of insulated, and we have been methodically breaking down those silos.

We truly believe the chance is to come around more shared services. As I mentioned, we now have 1 programming division across the full portfolio, which reports into Donna Langley, who besides oversees our movie studio. Now erstwhile we’re making programming decisions for broadcast, cable, or streaming, you’ve got 1 group that’s overseeing that strategy and that vision, which, again, I think helps us as we make decisions around content that could possibly play across multiple platforms in different windows.

We work very, very closely with the marketing department of NBC, and as you most likely noticed, like NBC promotes Peacock and locks up Peacock whenever they’re promoting their primetime show. We work very closely, the Peacock marketing squad works very closely with the NBC marketing team. And we have something which we call Symphony, where we all contribute a certain amount of inventory that we usage to cross advance across all of our platforms. If you’re going to see a show like Fight Night, which is simply a fresh show on Peacock from Will Packer, you’re going to see that promoted on NBC, on our cable networks, on Peacock, due to how we’re partnering on Symphony. And we’ve done something very similar, like, we’ve consolidated decision sciences and research, which is truly the center of gravity around all the analytics and the reporting. So, again, you have 1 squad that’s looking at that holistically across linear and across streaming.

We have 1 product squad and 1 technology squad that’s managing a single platform. We haven’t truly talked about this publicly, but possibly it’s just worth just spending 1 minute on. What we’re trying to effectuate here is NBC, we built as part of Peacock, a reasonably large squad of people that are building out our streaming platform, both on the product side and on the tech and on the engineering side. Our sister company, Sky, which operates in the UK, Italy, and Germany predominantly, they have a streaming service that you may be acquainted with called NOW TV. And these were 2 different groups with reasonably large teams that were building different platforms, in any cases akin features. And we recognized that there was an chance to consolidate it all under 1 team, which we did, and it’s called the Global Streaming Platform Group, which sits inside of D2C. I know I’m throwing quite a few acronyms at you.

This is what Decoder is all about. I’m ready for it.

GSP is now made up of thousands of people that study into my squad that are all across the world. They’re in the UK, they’re in Lisbon, they’re in Prague, they’re in fresh York. We’ve built 1 holistic team, and that platform is what powers Peacock, but this same platform is what powers a joint venture that we have in east and Central Europe with Paramount, called SkyShowtime. It’s the GSP platform that we’ve built as 1 company. It besides powers the platform that we launched in over 50 countries in Africa, through a venture that we have with a distributor called Multi-Choice, that’s besides the GSP platform. And next year, we are going to actually migrate NOW tv onto this 1 GSP platform, and so this has unlocked tremendous efficiencies across the company for us.

It also, I think, has been a immense motivator for the people that work on this due to the fact that now they’re working on 1 platform and it can increase the velocity where they can build things erstwhile and not gotta necessarily have teams competing against each other. And in many ways, this is what positioned us so well, in my opinion, for things like the exclusive NFL playoff game in January and the exclusive NFL game that we had a fewer weeks ago in Brazil with the Eagles and the Packers. It’s besides what positioned us so well as a platform, in my opinion, for the Paris Olympics. And it’s due to the fact that we’ve had this maniacal focus on how do we get more scale, more efficiency with a real commitment to, like, we want streaming to work like TV.

And what I mean by that is, you don’t think about it erstwhile you turn on the TV, generally. It’s a small bit like electricity. You don’t think about electricity unless there’s a blackout; then you think about electricity, but the electricity is what powers everything in your house. Everything that you’re utilizing in your home is likely getting powered by electricity. And that was, in a way, the ambition that we had with the platform, which is, can we make the platform so stable, so scalable, that latency buffering, crashes if besides many people are utilizing it, out of sync audio with video, all the things that have plagued streaming for years. Let’s do everything we can to just get that right. And if we could do that in a large way, then that gives us approval then to drive innovation.

The last 2 years, we have been truly organizing ourselves in that way, building a platform, due to the fact that livestreaming especially, if you haven’t noticed, is very hard. But we’ve been truly committed to that vision, and I think I’m arrogant of the squad and what we have accomplished due to the fact that it allowed us to then do something like the Paris Olympics, which we feel truly good about, due to the fact that all of the things that we introduced, we’ve wanted to introduce for years but we didn’t believe we had approval to do that until we got what I just called the basics, right? And to me, the basics are: nothing matters from an innovative standpoint if the platform doesn’t work. I feel like we’ve been very disciplined and focused on doing that, and we’ve structured ourselves around that ambition over the last couple of years.

Does that product squad study to you? Is that part of your group?

It is, yeah. The product impact teams study to me.

I don’t think we’ve always disclosed it publicly, but it’s in the thousands. We’ve got thousands of people. It has grown considerably over the last fewer years. And again, I think as we’ve built this platform and demonstrated the capabilities, it’s actually allowed me to partner with another parts of our company to shift more and more resources toward the global streaming platform team. This has truly been the tip of the spear in how we’re continuing to build out all of our technology on streaming going forward. And we work very closely, of course, with Comcast cable, who has a very large squad as well, but they have been more focused on connected TVs and connected tv devices. There’s like a complementary nature to how we work together, but our focus has been, as you can imagine, mostly on streaming video.

One of the things that’s truly interesting about what you’re describing is you have a core platform, and then the platform is expressed through various products, right? Peacock, the NOW service, what you’re doing in Africa. Do you always find yourself just looking at the Trello board litigating people’s priorities? Like the Peacock squad wants this feature, but the NOW squad wants another feature, and the platform has to make a decision about what goes first? due to the fact that all tech company looks like that.

Yeah. Well, the answer is, of course, yes, I mean, which is simply a very classical kind of challenge that you have erstwhile you become a shared service as a platform. And there’s ways around that, though. I mean, we do carve out a certain amount of capacity to the different services that we’re supporting.

So, for example, in any cases, there’s commonality, like SkyShowtime has advertising. Well, they actually benefited due to the fact that we had already launched advertising on Peacock, and so erstwhile they want to launch advertising in Poland, that’s a comparatively easy thing for us just to turn on due to the fact that it’s already been built. But in Africa, just as an example, the viewing behaviour is much more oriented toward mobile viewing due to the fact that they don’t have the broadband proliferation that we have in countries like the United States. The majority of streaming happens on mobile devices just due to the bandwidth constraints. And there’s besides different payment structures due to the fact that most people don’t always have the ability to pay by the month, and so they request to possibly pay by the day, or they, in any cases, gotta go to retail environments where they buy vouchers to pay. We gotta build capabilities that are more unique to that market.

You should be able to arbitrage certain capacity depending on the priorities, but there’s a benefit, which is erstwhile you build these capabilities, we’re building it once, and so now we have that capability. If we always wanted to introduce that functionality in another markets, it’s not like we’re building it erstwhile and it’s throwaway work. We can actually leverage it and benefit it across, and it benefits another parts of the platform.

It is simply a kind of a balancing act, but I feel like, generally, Peacock is surely the center of where we’re focusing the vast majority of our resources, given the priority, the importance of it. And I would say the majority of how we’re utilizing the platform in another countries is drafting behind Peacock and the Peacock roadmap, with the exceptions of any of the things that I just mentioned that are more unique to those markets.

A lot of companies that build large costly core infrastructure like you’re describing, erstwhile they’ve built it, they want to sale it, right? They want to go monetize it, white description it, give it to another people, get any more value out of the investment. Do you have adequate scale with your own products and your own partnerships to support the ongoing investment here, or would you go white description it to 1 of your partners?

No, we have no ambition of white labeling it. We’re being very surgical, I would say, and methodical on how we’re reasoning of this. So, in the examples that I’ve given, we have partnerships. The SkyShowtime venture is simply a 50/50 venture. The venture in Africa that I mentioned, we have an equity stake in that venture, and obviously, we own Sky as a broader Comcast company.

I think that our ambition is not to build a white description platform. The benefit of what I’m describing is that as we’ve kind of created these partnerships, which has allowed me to get more scale; it besides subsidizes the improvement for Peacock. By strategically licensing our platform in the ways that I’ve described, it’s bringing in actually another gross stream to me that I’m then able to usage to add more resources to accelerate the development. And again, all of these pieces is what’s positioned us in a way to let us to do any of the large things that we’ve been able to do over the last couple of years, especially around live programming.

You’ve described the core platform as a shared service a fewer times. You’ve described how Peacock went from being inside of an incubator at NBCUniversal, to now being part of the broader portfolio. Do you think of what you’re doing as the kind of tip of the spear to get fresh customers, younger customers? Do you think, eventually, you’ll become the center of gravity alternatively of a shared service, or is it always just going to be part of the portfolio?

I mentioned earlier that erstwhile I came to NBC from Comcast, Steve Burke called me, and I’ve known Steve for a long time. He actually hired me at Comcast erstwhile he was the president of Comcast, and it was kind of full ellipse erstwhile he asked me to then come to NBC erstwhile he was the CEO of NBC. But he said something to me on the telephone which resonated, which is he said, “Peacock’s our future.” And I interpreted that not just that it’s the future gross growth or growth for subscribers. I interpreted it as it’s like this is how we could build a fresh culture, and that’s what excited me.

Part of what I’m truly arrogant about that we’ve done inside of NBC since I’ve been there is not only established Peacock as the fastest increasing streamer, and our last earnings, I think you know, we’re at 33 million subscribers and continuing to show bottom line growth. I’m besides arrogant of the culture that we’ve built inside of NBC, which, to me, is equally important. And I’ve most likely spent of a vast majority of my time truly on how we build that culture in a way that I believe is going to position us for success. And It’s around collaboration; it’s around communication, transparency.

Remember, Peacock was born in covid. I was virtually in my home building a fresh service that I had to coordinate with hundreds of another people that were not in the same area with me. And that forced quite a few communication, quite a few transparency, quite a few trust, quite a few people feeling ownership. And I have been doing everything I can with the aid of others to foster that sense of culture and that has started to spread into another parts of the company. I think from that respect, yes, I do think that Peacock is in many ways trying to change the company in any ways from the inside out, by besides being respectful of the expertise of another parts of the company inside NBC.

But I do think over time, our future is very much anchored on streaming and Peacock, and that is, but the difference is everyone inside the company owns a part of that. It’s not 1 group anymore. It’s now news, sports, entertainment. all single part of our company has their DNA in any way connected back to Peacock. And I think that is our superpower: how do we harness that power inside the company to so everybody feels ownership of it? And I think that’s been most likely the biggest transformation I’ve seen over the past 4 years since I’ve been at the company.

This leads right into the another Decoder question. You’re evidently a change agent inside of NBC, right? You’re going around all these groups, getting them to participate. erstwhile you were on the cable side, I’m assuming you had a different attitude toward making change. How do you make decisions now? What’s your framework, and how has it changed?

I actually didn’t have a different position erstwhile I was at cable, only due to the fact that over 10 years ago, I was part of a group that was nested inside of Comcast cable, which was called Comcast Interactive Media, and we were there to disrupt the cable business, and that’s precisely what we did. That being a change agent is actually something I enjoy, but being a change agent in the right way I think is besides important, which is through collaboration, through challenging people but doing it, I think, in a respectful way and in more of an intellectual way and getting people to buy in. I truly enjoy that aspect of the roles that I’ve played at Comcast and the roles that I’ve played at NBC.

I’m not certain if this is answering your question directly, but I think it’s our goal within NBC is we want to get Peacock to scale. We have subscriber targets that we want to get to; we surely want to get to profitability.

We are not profitable now, but it’s investing. The way I look at it, and this is kind of something that’s so interesting because, and I just ignore it to be honest with you, but you’ll see press articles where it’s like, “Peacock is losing money.” I mean, we are a startup business. I’ve never seen a startup… I mean, did Amazon make money immediately? I think that you’ve got to have a much longer-term view here, where I say no, we are investing in a business, and so what you’re looking for erstwhile you’re investing in a fresh business is: Are you growing? Are you hitting your KPIs and the metrics? Are you achieving the long-range plan objectives? And the answer to those are, yes, we’re actually exceeding those objectives, which only gives us assurance that we’re on the right path. We have a long-range plan, and we are executing against it.

So, getting Peacock to scale, getting Peacock to profitability, but again, doing it in a way inside the broader portfolio is truly where we’re focusing quite a few our resources and our efforts, and we feel truly good that we’re on the right path.

How do you make decisions inside of that framework?

I think that in order to accomplish what I just said, if you’re a subscription business, you request to say, “Okay, what’s going to drive acquisition, which is an crucial ingredient to a subscription service? What’s going to drive retention and engagement? What is going to drive frequency?” Which is something that’s not truly talked a lot about with streaming services, but it’s something that I’m very focused on, which is, how do you actually change the paradigm where you want people to go into your app all single day? And again, that’s not the way people typically think of streaming due to the fact that if it’s all on-demand or it’s all binge-viewing, you’re fundamentally telling the consumer it’s there whenever you want it. There’s no urgency to it, and we want to actually get people to open up our app all single day due to the fact that that just gives you more at-bats, so to speak, to effort to drive them into another parts of the service, which then drives more engagement, more monetization, better retention.

When you look at it through that lens, it drives quite a few our decision-making. So, our programming decisions around — it’s like a common fund. You request a balance. It can’t be 1 utmost or the other. If you’re besides focused on acquisition, then it’s a leaky bucket. You’ll get quite a few people to sign up for your service, but then you’ll just lose them due to the fact that you don’t have adequate content to engage and hold them. And then vice versa, if you’ve got quite a few content that drives engagement, that’s not going to get you to scale due to the fact that you request the… we are managing it almost like, I think of it as like a common fund.

We have a budget. We have a programming budget. We have a marketing budget. We have a P&L inside of NBCUniversal that’s dedicated to Peacock, even though we are part of the broader portfolio, and so we’re making decisions around: what do we request to do in order to accomplish those goals? But I feel like we got rocket fuel due to the fact that I have the added benefit of tapping into this broader portfolio that could materially add more marketing value or, remember, we’re the home for all the Universal movies. erstwhile Twisters or Wicked goes into theaters, we’re the next halt after the premium transactional window. We’re the exclusive home for all the next day NBC programming. We’re the exclusive home for the Bravo programming. We’re—

Can I actually ask you about that? due to the fact that I’ve been very curious about this. That strategy has been tried by any of your larger competitors. Disney notably tried this. Max has tried this in different ways. And 1 of the issues there is, your studio doesn’t get to go to marketplace and say, “How much do you want to pay for Twisters in the first window after the pay window?” and get bids from Netflix and Max in Peacock. Do you gotta bid? Do you win? How are those economics accounted for?

You’ve most likely heard this, and this is something that’s comic due to the fact that quite a few people don’t believe this, but any of the most contentious negotiations happen internally.

Of course. Families fight the hardest.

Yeah, and sometimes, it’s counterintuitive to people, but the short answer is, yes. I mean, look, we have profit participants. We gotta keep negotiations at arm’s length, and in many cases, our content and the price of our content is being set by the market. And we don’t exclusively licence all single part of content on Peacock. I mentioned our movies. Our movies, we are the first window, but then there’s a pay 1A, and then there’s a pay 1B. There are also 3rd parties that our teams licence their content to, and so it establishes marketplace dynamics that we then request to negociate against. So, we are paying our fair share erstwhile it comes to programming. And even in the case of the NBC next-day programming, that content was available before on another streaming service, and so there was a set value that was already ascribed to it that we fundamentally had to step into if we then wanted to migrate that content onto Peacock, which we did.

My only point was as a company, we made the decision that we wanted Peacock to be the home for our content, which meant that we were going to besides gotta put our money where our mouth is, so to speak, and make the investment to let us to claw back that programming. And we’ve been doing that, but by doing that, it besides continues to tether us straight into another parts of the company in a very affirmative way. Because, again, we’re all working together to proceed to accomplish these collective goals around Peacock.

I do like that we keep treating Netflix like Voldemort, and we won’t say its name. It’s very good.

I have tremendous respect for them, and I don’t think a full lot about another streaming services. And so this isn’t… I’m not trying to be derogatory in any way.

You are not our first executive who will name the competitors.

We just had Greg [Peters, Netflix co-CEO] on the show. Netflix is simply a public company. We can look at their economics. They’re profitable, they’re doing well. We can see besides inside of the business. They’re fundamentally investing in cheaper programming, right? Lots of live comedy specials, lots of reality shows. They’re not doing the large premium dramas the way that they utilized to be doing.

You’ve got the large catalog from NBC. Does that give you the ability to say, “Okay, we’re going to make the money again. Friends is long since paid for. That is pure margin for Peacock. We are going to invest in paying more for Universal’s catalog due to the fact that that’ll keep people here”?

We’re playing to our strengths. And 1 of our strengths — and, to be honest, I did not appreciate this erstwhile I first came to NBC — is just how much people love the NBC content. And I’m not just talking about the current programming. I’m talking about the deep catalog of content that NBC has. We have 80,000 hours of programming on Peacock on-demand, and that has been a immense advantage. To have a show like The Office, Parks and Rec, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, to be able to have the Dick Wolf catalog of Law and Orders and Chicagos, to have all period of [Saturday Night Live]. I mean, these are things that, again, play to our strengths that we knew drives quite a few engagement. That’s been a benefit.

We never subscribe to the fact that streaming should be just scripted dramas. That is simply a large part of it, for sure. Scripted dramas do drive acquisition and aid with brand development, and you can almost most likely think of a show that you could ascribe to a streaming service as, kind of like, you put it on the map, so to speak, as an inflection point. So, that was always part of the calculus for us as well, but we always knew and believed that streaming could be so much more. Unscripted, live sports, live news, that’s been part of Peacock from day one. Arguably, it’s the huntsman becoming the hunted, where you’re seeing another streaming services, I would argue, are moving more into our space than we’re moving into their space, including the fact that we’ve been very committed from the beginning to an ad model, which we believed was the large chance for us.

And, due to the fact that we knew that eyeballs were going to proceed to shift more to streaming for all the reasons that you said earlier. And we besides knew that the majority of streaming happens on the TV, even though most people thought it happened on the phone, but the tv is like the fresh TV, and you’re now seeing all streaming service for the most part, launching an ad tier. The marketplace is evolving, but it’s evolving, I think, in a very predictable way. But we truly have been very consistent with our imagination and strategy, and I think that’s actually given us an advantage due to the fact that it’s allowed us respective years to invest in live programming and invest in advertising as part of our platform DNA, which just puts us in a very different place in our trajectory, compared possibly to any another services.

Let’s talk about sports and the Olympics and the NFL a small bit, just to wrap up. The Olympics were a large hit on Peacock. The app was ready, the features were incredible. I’m curious: there was quite a few stuff going on in Peacock. You had the Gold Zone. You had live highlights. There’s an AI Al Michaels situation. There were replays. There’s multiple channels.

How did you integrate the product and programming teams there? Was that a single team? Did the Olympics squad from NBC come and say, “We’re going to do the Gold region — get it ready”? How did that work?

Remember, from a product and technology perspective, it’s this GSP team, this platform that I mentioned, so it’s the same team. And since we’re all part of the same group, we virtually sit right next to the NBC Sports squad and next to the NBC amusement team, and so we work hand-in-glove with these different teams.

When we brainstorm ideas and we identify where we want to go and where we see the opportunity, and I think that we kind of recognized with Paris early on, the stakes were high. Right? I mean, we’re coming out of covid for the last 2 Olympics where there were questions about the cultural relevancy of the Olympics going forward. I think, if I’m being very candid, I don’t believe Peacock truly fulfilled the promise of the Olympics for streamers and for cord cutters with Beijing and with Tokyo for a variety of reasons. But I think that there were real questions about whether or not we could truly deliver the experience that we knew we needed to deliver. The stakes were high, and we take it so seriously. It’s a privilege to work on the Olympics. That’s truly how quite a few us feel, and it’s a tremendous responsibility.

We thought we were ready to surprise and delight and introduce features that we believe possibly could change the way people experience sports. And what I don’t think people appreciate, and this, again, is just the benefit of being a part of a bigger company, is that Paris has been 10 years in the making.

So, for example, erstwhile you went on to Peacock and you watched a replay — possibly you missed an event and you wanted to watch Simone Biles — making the content available on-demand and for replays, that was first done in London 2012 at Comcast. That was the first time we made all the Olympics available on-demand. erstwhile you saw the Gold region with Scott Hanson, which was fantastic and the NBC sports squad did an amazing occupation producing that, we actually tested that, if you look, in Sochi in 2014. We tested the Gold region and that idea. erstwhile people were watching Snoop, who became the ambassador of the Olympics, which is like a surreal thing due to the fact that he became so relatable to so many people, we tested Snoop in Tokyo in 2020, where we gave him an Olympic show on Peacock due to the fact that it was besides controversial to put him on NBC at the time. This has been an evolution that has gotten us to this place, but it is an example where all part of the company was firing on all cylinders.

And it besides speaks to what I said earlier, where Peacock was the number 1 app. Peacock, we had more digital consumption on Peacock for Paris than all another Olympics combined. And at the same time, though, there was always a question of, well, is that going to cannibalize the primetime show for NBC? And that didn’t happen. The NBC primetime show had a record number of viewing due to the fact that people were watching on Peacock during the day, but then they wanted to see the storytelling that NBC does so well during primetime, and that’s that infinity loop that I was referring to. It truly is an example of, I think, what plays to our strengths, what we do well as a company. And we were preparing for years for that moment, and we’re truly arrogant of what we were able to deliver.

I think in many respects, there’s no going back because, erstwhile you could deliver that kind of experience and you get that response, we’re now looking at it and saying, “Well, how do we then apply that to the NBA? How do we apply that to the Premier League? How do we apply that to another types of experiences?” And this is the next frontier for streaming, from my point of view, due to the fact that right now, streaming is arguably a two-dimensional service, which is: I sign up for your service based on your content and your price. I think the next iteration will be product. How do you start to usage the product in a way that differentiates the experience from 1 streaming service to another, where arguably now there’s more similarity than differences? The Olympics is an example of what I mean erstwhile I say the product can become part of the value proposition of where we want to go over time.

If I were to task out in the future, I actually think the next version of where I then want to go with Peacock and with streaming is to grow the aperture even beyond video. It goes back to what I said about time. How do you get more share of time? If 5 hours is the ceiling for video, how do we start tapping into another ways that we can drive engagement on our platform and add more value? due to the fact that it’s not a streaming platform — it’s an amusement platform. That’s the way we’re starting to think of it. And we’ve got lots of another parts of the company that could be leaning into how do we get more share of time, but also, how do we start to get more share of wallet?

You can imagine 1 day, Nilay, that you subscribe to Peacock ,and not only do you get this large video service, but possibly if you’re a Peacock subscriber, you get a free movie ticket to Fandango. possibly if you’re a Peacock subscriber, you get early admission to Universal subject parks. possibly given our advertiser relationships, possibly you get discounts to McDonald’s. I mean, so we are reasoning very differently, I believe, in how we want to evolve the value proposition beyond just what it is present — anticipating where we think we request to go as a platform.

You had a large influx of subscribers for the Olympics. How many of you retained? We’ve talked about this a lot. Have you held onto quite a few those subscribers?

We haven’t disclosed the number, but I guess 1 way to think of it is: 90 percent of people who engage with sports on Peacock watch another content. So, again, we look at sports — there’s no bigger fandom than sports. SAnd so sports, as I mentioned earlier, is simply a very effective maneuver to drive acquisition. We’ve shown that with the NFL exclusive games and NFL regular period games. We’ve shown that, certainly, with the Olympics, but we besides have specified a large portfolio of another programming.

The way that that’s manifesting, just to kind of build on this for a second, is that erstwhile you look at something like the playoff game that we did earlier in the year, it was the most viewership engagement we’ve always had on Peacock. But the next day after the playoff game was the biggest on-demand usage day we always had on Peacock. And 1 of our originals, Ted, the Seth MacFarlane show, was the number 1 first we always had on Peacock. And then, The Traitors, which just actually won the Emmy for Best Unscripted Competition Show, was the number 1 unscripted show on Peacock. We have the ability to bend the curve erstwhile we could take individual who comes in for sports but utilize the product in a way to engage them with another content on our platform. And again, that’s the benefit of having specified a large catalog of programming for each individual in the home.

Sports rights are getting more and more costly over time, producing the Olympics, evidently not cheap. NBC can do all this due to the fact that it can monetize that in respective different ways. You have broadcast, which is lucrative. You’ve got cable, which is inactive lucrative, and now have Peacock. Will Peacock always get to a place where it can support 1 of these large sports rights deals all by itself?

If you look at something like our WWE deal, which is sports entertainment, all of those events utilized to be pay-per-view events, and those are now exclusively available on Peacock. And that was a deal that we entered into that even though we have a relation with the WWE for USA, that was a decision that we made that was very circumstantial to just Peacock.

But I actually think of it a small bit differently. We’re not truly focused on sports that are unique to just Peacock. I think 1 of the benefits of being part of this bigger portfolio is we have the ability to make content like sports available on different platforms. And I think erstwhile you look at something like the NBA, which we’re very excited about and is evidently a very large deal for us as a company, these rights only come up all decade, and so it’s good to have these rights back where they belong on NBC and on Peacock. I think part of the reason that we were able to enter into that relation is due to the fact that we’re more than just streaming and that we have specified a broad scope with broadcast and with cable. I see that as a strength, and to me, that’s something that I would want to proceed leaning into as we measure sports rights deals going forward.

My belief is most leagues see it the same way ‚ that they don’t necessarily want it to be limited to just streaming due to the fact that you inactive have specified a large audience that’s available on these another platforms, including pay television.

You’ve walked into my trap by talking about the product and talking about sports. What do I gotta do to get a actual 4K NFL game on Peacock? How much? I will pay you directly.

[Laughs] Well, I don’t know how to rather answer that.

Just say yes. In your heart, just say yes. You know you want to.

I do want to, and so, yes, we have the same ambition that you do. We want to offer all event in the highest quality.

But NBC — I talked to Neal [Mohan] at YouTube, and I’m like, “What’s keeping you?” And he is like, “Millions of partnerships and broadcasters.” NBC owns the full chain. You’ve got the broadcast booth. You’ve got the production. You’ve got the rights directly. You’ve got the platform. What’s stopping you?

I think that we want to make certain that erstwhile we’re delivering content, especially content that’s simulcast across the different properties. We want to deliver it in the highest quality universally. If we’re going to deliver the content in 4K on Peacock, I think it’s besides crucial that we’re able to deliver it in 4K to our broadcasted stations and to our cable and satellite distributors. It adds a small bit of complexity in having that focus. The relationships and how we approach the marketplace is meaningful to us, and we want to make certain that we’re doing it in a very comprehensive way for all of our partners, not just 1 platform.

But I’m your partner, and I want you to know that I want 4K.

Listen, I share your ambition and your enthusiasm. We will get there. I think we’ve shown that we’re continuing to evolve the product and the platform. Hopefully, you’re seeing that as a consumer, and again, the Olympics is an example.

Do you see request for higher video quality? This is the thing that I worry about — is that people choice convenience over quality all the time, and the request for 4K or advanced bit rate, it just isn’t there.

I think I’m going to put back on my Comcast hat. We’ve been delivering 4K, and most people don’t really know if they have a 4K television, or they think they’re watching in 4K and they’re watching in like 720p. I don’t think the average consumer mostly truly does realize it due to the fact that it is confusing. Like, what is 4K? What’s Ultra-HD? What’s HDR? There’s quite a few marketing rhetoric. I don’t know if it’s being truly driven by the consumer as much as possibly a sub-segment of the consumer—

Our ambition is to offer the best and highest quality video and audio, so to me, that’s an crucial quality of the platform, and technically, that is what we’re building toward. Whether the consumer is necessarily asking for it or not, we want to offer them the best and highest quality, and so that is truly the ambition of where we’re going with Peacock. And I think we will absolutely get there.

All right, Matt. This has been great. You’ve got to come back erstwhile you have 4K football, due to the fact that that’s the only thing I wanted. I did this full conversation. I waited until the end. I want to point that out.

It was a real pleasance talking to you. Thank you for having me on the show. I appreciate it.