NBC sees the $110 million NFL playoff game airing exclusively on Peacock as a doorway into a much bigger house.
The Chiefs host the Dolphins on Saturday night on the NBC streaming service which is in about 30 million homes, less than half the reach of NBC and the other three broadcast networks, and voices ranging from sports radio legend Mike Francesa to Chiefs defensive end Charles Omenihu already have griped about it.
Asked by The Post in an exclusive interview what he would say to the detractors, newly minted NBC Sports president Rick Cordella understood the consternation but emphasized the “halo effect” of all the other sports and entertainment properties for subscribers to enjoy on the platform.
“Look, I think any time there’s change there will be people that talk about it. We saw that with WWE and English Premier League,” he said.
“We survey our users on Peacock every month, and know that [their fans] are two of the most highly satisfied cohorts overall. I think the big thing with our game on Saturday night is we have to do a great job explaining all the great content that we have on our platform.”
Therefore, Cordella, 47, explained, it’s “not a pay-per-view.”
The playoff game the streaming service is airing features a lot of star power, including generational talents such as Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce and Tyreek Hill, as well as Tua Tagovailoa who has been one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL since Mike McDaniel became the Dolphins’ head coach last season.
In addition to the aforementioned WWE premium live events, including the Royal Rumble and WrestleMania, and English soccer, Peacock has exclusive Big Ten football and basketball and simulcasts of NBC Sports properties such as “Sunday Night Football” and the Olympics.
Entertainment-wise, Peacock has original series such as “Poker Face”, “Bel-Air” and “The Traitors”, next day airings of NBC and Bravo shows and library content including the full archives of “The Office”, “Yellowstone” and “Saturday Night Live”.
“It’s more or less, get them in the door with football, and expose them to the library, which we think is one of the best — if not the best — in streaming,” Cordella said.
“It’s a lot more than just this football game. You see reasonable people complaining, and then they realize what it is beyond a one-time NFL streamer.”
The game will still air on broadcast TV in the local Kansas City and Miami markets; Mike Tirico and Jason Garrett are on the call.
As far as how they made the decision to take this expensive plunge, Cordella said the NBC Sports group did their “math and modeling” on a playoff game as soon as it came up for bid last spring.
“Luckily we have a lot of data on how sports has performed on Peacock, and how people have behaved once they’ve gotten into the ecosystem. Of the people that come in from sports as their first view, nine out of ten of their consumption hours are not sports,” he said.
“There’s a halo effect that we see once they’re in the platform. You apply that into the model. you understand what we’re paying for it, and see if that makes sense over the course of a longer term strategy to make this move — and for us it did.”
Peacock has had a test run with both the technology and fans’ appetite to splurge for yet another streaming subscription, airing Bills vs. Chargers exclusively in Week 16.
They were able to use a lead-in game on NBC to promote the Peacock matchup in the company’s doubleheader, as they will be able to do again on Saturday with Texans-Browns airing earlier in the afternoon.
More than any other professional sports league, the NFL has emphasized maximizing total reach, airing a much higher proportion of its games on broadcast TV as compared to the other leagues, which is one of the myriad factors in why the NFL dwarfs all other leagues’ viewership.
On an NBC conference call on Wednesday, NFL Executive Vice President of Media Distribution Hans Schroeder explained the rationale of agreeing to put this particular playoff game behind a paywall.
“We’re still very committed to broadcast. That is still and continues to be the broadest possible reach. The viewership we get, you can’t reach 190 million people throughout the course of the year without having very broad distribution of your content, and that’s always been a bedrock for us and I think a real differentiator for us versus other sports,” Schroeder said.
“Every one of our games is on broadcast television, at least in their market, and probably 90 percent of our games is on broadcast as their core platform. But for us, it remains really important, while we continue to remain very strong there and have great partnerships with the broadcast partners that we do, to increase our presence across digital.”
Schroeder noted the consumption shift in linear to streaming TV, particularly among the younger audience.
“We know and we see the continued evolution in the media landscape, and we want to be where our fans are. We know they’re increasingly, especially younger fans, on different screens,” he said.
“So that’s why it’s important for us, not just for this wild card game, but throughout the year, that we’re on Peacock and Paramount+ and Amazon and these different digital platforms, and why our distribution is on somewhere like NFL+.
“Again, we’re very focused and very committed on broadcast. For us, it’s not either/or, it’s both. We want to continue to broaden the distribution for our content. That’s the way we think we engage the broadest possible fans, and that’s what the driving strategy is for the majority of our content.”
