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For those NFL fans who were hoping NBC/Peacock’s streaming-only NFL playoff game experiment would blow up in their face, we’ve got some bad news to report: the gambit worked like gangbusters for the company.
According to NBCUniversal, the live stream of the AFC Wild Card round game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Miami Dolphins accounted for a staggering 30% of total internet traffic during the game.
Furthermore, a third-party research firm found that the game resulted in the “single biggest subscriber acquisition event” that it has ever recorded.
Based on its preliminary analysis, the company estimates Peacock saw a total of 2.8 million sign-ups over NFL Wild Card Game weekend. According to research firm Antenna, that makes the Chiefs-Dolphins game the single biggest subscriber acquisition event it has ever measured.
Per Antenna, using comparable three-day windows, Peacock’s AFC Wild Card game drove more sign-ups than past Super Bowls that were available on subscription-streaming platforms (although those were not exclusively available on streaming). Disney+ in 2019 saw more than 2.5 million sign-ups in a single day, but no other single programming event resulted in as many sign-ups to a service in a three-day period as Peacock had. [via Variety]
The good news doesn’t stop there for NBCU, however, as Antenna’s research has found that “certain sports fans prove to be more loyal than the average subscriber,” meaning they could retain a larger number of subscribers than other streamers do from similar events.
The data behind NBCU’s Peacock-streamed NFL game come the same week that Netflix announced they had acquired the rights to become the exclusive home of WWE’s long-running RAW series for $5 billion, which is another massive step towards the ongoing assimilation of streaming services and live events.
Given the success of the experiment, it’s certainly likely that NBCU will try to pull the same move during next year’s playoffs, too.
CBS, another of the NFL’s broadcasters, also has its own streaming service (Paramout+), as does ESPN (ESPN+). Fox, however, the fourth and final NFL broadcaster, does not have a streaming service of note other than the right-wing politics-focused streaming service Fox Nation.