What Worked, What Didn’t In Peacock’s Streaming Olympics

The quadzillion events of the Paris Olympics are finally finished, the medals parceled out, the athletes heading home after the closing ceremonies. It’s time to look at what worked in the Games where streaming video finally grew up.

Comcast’s NBCUniversal unit did its usual blanket event coverage, with its usual slickly produced prime-time shows and plenty else. But now fans could actually see all the stuff Comcast crews recorded, not just the tiny percentage of moments that made it past NBC’s particular prime-time network prerogatives.

The company’s four-year-old Peacock subscription streaming service finally realized the promise of the technology, bringing all that deep, deep video to millions of viewers, and making the Games more accessible than ever.

It was a big step up from the previous Summer Games, in Tokyo. Peacock launched in the spring of 2020, hoping to ride attention from a few high-profile original scripted shows paired with heavy Olympics coverage, to a fast start in the then-new Streaming Wars.

Alas, the pandemic that drove viewership for Disney+ and Netflix was a disaster for Peacock, which didn’t have enough unique scripted programming to make up for the Games’ delay by a year. Viewership languished.

When the Games finally convened in the summer of 2021, they had no live audiences, little energy and less enthusiasm to watch. Peacock, which struggled to find paying customers (back then, Comcast gave away the service for free to its broadband subscribers), remained mired well back in the pack of competing subscription video services.

Fast forward three years, and Peacock is a different bird. Peacock’s business model evolved, and audiences have become accustomed to routinely buying deep online libraries of content when they want (and also cancelling when they’ve seen what they came for). All told, this Games on streaming went a lot better. Not everything worked, and I’ll get to those in a bit. But here are some notes on what I liked:

• People relied on streaming a lot. Most streaming of NBCU content came through Peacock (the company also owns the free, ad-supported streaming service now called, in another business-model evolution, Xumo Play). Peacock (mostly) attracted 17 billion minutes of viewing through the morning of Aug. 6, NBCU said. Even with six more days of viewing to go, the service had already piled up more minutes streamed than the last winter and summer games combined, and four times Tokyo’s 2021 levels.

• Want to dive as deep as those near-perfect Chinese medalists? Peacock made it happen. Every sport had its own streaming vertical, stuffed with live and recorded competitions, profiles, highlights and more. Want to catch all of that Croatia-Serbia men’s water polo gold medal match? It was there in all its splashy glory. Same with canoe slalom, team handball, trampoline, breaking, equestrian, and shooting sports, among much else. It was particularly great for the many obscure sports that get one quadrennial shot at an Olympic spotlight in front of a bigger crowd, but might feature only a couple of minutes of highlights on the mothership broadcast. I’m normally a big critic of most SVOD services’ mediocre user interfaces (Netflix is the big exception). But this sport-by-sport spotlight was highly practical, easy to navigate, and has uses beyond the Olympics. Colleges should be taking notes on the interface, as more and more schools build their own video services to drive viewership and connections with their less-prominent sports beyond football and men’s basketball. Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and Olivia “Livvy” Dunne showed this year what can happen for breakthrough female college athletes in this era of social media, direct-to-consumer video and NIL. Interfaces like Peacock’s can give next season’s stars in the making better, more accessible video platforms to build their fame and personal brands, while helping colleges connect more deeply with their supporters.
• Snoop Dogg Everywhere. The lanky Long Beach rapper-turned-corporate spokesman proved to be a likable and omnipresent on-air personality across many Olympic events, often watching competitions from the stands alongside the family of some star athlete. I especially loved Snoop’s equestrian look with top hat and tails alongside Martha Stewart, the bemused 83-year-old thirst trap who helped the Dogg muster the courage to feed a carrot to a horse. Snoop was often funny, always engaging, and just about everywhere. And of course, NBC didn’t miss any chance to advertise Snoop’s new role as judge on the network’s long-running music competition The Voice beginning next month (see clip below).
• Other specialized, personality-driven sports packages. The four-screens-in-one Gold offering, cribbed from NFL game day ‘casts, bopped around multiple sports as notable moments came up. The usual boring highlights package got an amusing boost with the pairing of Kevin Hart and SNL stalwart Kenan Thompson to comically riff on stuff that also might have been tangentially related to the day’s athletic highlights. See the YouTube clip below for Thompson excavating his Pierre Escargot SNL character, which had been “in this bathtub for 29 years.” Also noteworthy: the “A.I. Al Michaels” daily newsletter of video highlights seemed well received, though it’s also notable how much human curation went into creating those individually customized AI-compiled newsletters at scale. As in, a LOT.
• Advertisers loved it too. NBCUniversal put out a release early in Week 2 saying it already had raked in the most Olympic and Paralympic ad revenue ever, more than 2016’s Rio de Janeiro games and the 2021 Tokyo games combined. And 70 percent of sponsors were first-timers, which suggests that here, as in other parts of the connected TV universe, advertisers are getting increasingly comfortable putting their brands next to premium, brand-safe online content. Just don’t tell that to Elon Musk.

Not everything worked, of course, though that wasn’t necessarily Comcast’s fault, or even the Olympics. A couple of things I didn’t like:

• Endless AI pitches from tech giants. The AI revolution has been a boon to hardware and services companies such as Nvidia selling “picks and shovels” to giant technology companies spending billions of dollars to create the AI future. It turns out that list of gold rush beneficiaries should have included Comcast, given how many Olympic ad slots it sold to Microsoft, Google, Meta and even SalesForce, whose widely used customer-relationship-management software is the antithesis of a consumer-facing product. The past couple or three weeks, we’ve also seen increased Wall Street skepticism about how fast those AI billions in CapEx will start to return actual profits. Share prices plummeted for most tech giants last week. Could the whiff of desperation undergirding these endless AI ads have contributed to the Street’s sudden “show-us-the-money” mindset? Worth noting: tech giant Apple, which didn’t see its shares drop much, almost certainly will debut parts of its A.I. approach, so-called “Apple Intelligence,” next month along with a new generation of iPhones. Did you hear a peep from Apple about AI during the Games? Nope. One of the effective tech-marketing machines the world has ever seen instead chose to advertise the privacy capabilities of Safari, its 21-year-old web browser (see clip below). Of course.
• How much gymnastics can one human watch? Gymnastics, like figure skating in the Winter Games, emits a near-pheromone-like attraction to a certain set of viewers, many of them female, who otherwise are generally indifferent to sports programming. Accordingly, NBC programs the hell out of both sports for its traditional broadcast Olympics coverage. But it’s worth asking how much is too much, not so much for viewers, but for the competitors. Even Simone Biles, the G.O.A.T. of American gymnastics, had a major fall on her last day of competition. The best gymnasts took part in as many as 17 boundary-pushing performances across team, all-around and individual versions of the same four events. That last day filled with falls and screwups suggests that many besides Biles were clearly worn out. Athlete exhaustion isn’t just for gymnasts either. The world’s best soccer players typically put in 40 weekends a year of club matches, interspersed with in-season club and country tournaments. This summer, many players participated for their countries in either the Copa America or European championships, plus the Olympics. The formerly quiet summer weeks now are also a chance for clubs to build overseas fandom with exhibition matches. So, off they go. Similarly, Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese may have made a big splash in their first WNBA seasons, but may secretly have had reason to be grateful for a break when they weren’t included on the Olympic team. They each played a full season of college ball, led their respective teams’ deep March Madness runs, and then were logging heavy minutes in the WNBA just weeks later. Athletes’ bodies have limits, even if fan appetites don’t. Athletes, teams, leagues, streaming services and national governing bodies are all going to have to figure out how to balance these realities out.