On today’s episode of Variety‘s “Strictly Business” podcast, Matt Strauss, chairman of NBCUniversal Media Group, expands on the evolution of the Peacock streamer and his view of the “the great re-bundling” that is underway for streaming media.
Strauss, who is a 22-year veteran of Comcast and NBCUniversal, unpacks the deal that NBCU recently struck with YouTube to make Peacock available to all YouTube Premium subscribers, which promises to bring in “many millions” of subscribers when it kicks in next year. Strauss also weighs in on the vision for building out the Peacock platform as a form of membership system that can bring consumers deeper into everything NBCU has to offer, from theme parks to partnership perks with big NBCU ad clients.
Strauss emphasizes that the moves for Peacock and other streamers represents the next wave of growth for the platforms that major media firms have poured billions of dollars into over the past decade. NBCU has gone all in on sports for Peacock because they firmly believe that sports is a huge part of the glue that keeps subscribers paying the monthly fee for the service — just as big-league sports were the epoxy that kept the linear cable bundle together for years.
