Fubo CEO ‘Horrified’ By Peacock-Exclusive NFL Playoff Game

NBA Hall of Famer turned analyst Charles Barkley ripped the Peacock-exclusive NFL Wild Card game between the Chiefs and Dolphins before it even aired, saying, “That’s not cool, they’re just being greedy pigs.”

Legendary comedian and sports fan Bill Burr (among many others) ripped the NFL and Peacock for repeatedly bragging that the game being aired exclusively on the streaming service was “historical.”

Meanwhile, during his appearance at the Needham Growth Conference this week, Fubo CEO David Gandler said he was “horrified” by the move to put NFL playoff games on Peacock.

Which is understandable considering Fubo pays for the rights to have NBC as one of the channels that is available on their service.

It’s not just for that reason that the move upset him though.

“When I think about the Peacock situation from a consumer perspective, it’s sad to see,” he said, adding, “People are paying for much of the same content several times.”

He’s not wrong. Between live TV, services like Peacock and Paramount+ and others, and the fact that shows and movies seem to shift from one service to another at the whim of these company’s executives, people are quite often paying twice (or more) for access to the same content.

After the Wild Card Game, the NFL and Peacock crowed about “an average of 23 million people” tuning it, “making the first ever NFL playoff game to be exclusively streamed the most streamed event of any kind in the U.S. ever.”

NBC’s Mike Tirico even called it “a milestone moment in media and sports history.”

What Peacock failed to mention, however, is the fact that the 23 million people who viewed the Chiefs and Dolphins game could have been almost twice that much when factoring in the Taylor Swift fans who would have checked it out had it aired on free TV.

This week, Howard Stern somewhat ironically since his show airs behind a paywall, predicted NFL “fans will rebel” over the NFL doing things like air games exclusively on Peacock.

Then again, as Barkley pointed out, the NFL really doesn’t care about its fans because the league is “just flat out greedy.”