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Peacock has added Local News channels for some cities in the US. The caveat here is that it has only added those local affiliates that it owns. Which surprisingly, is a fairly small amount.
As of today, Peacock has added five channels: Chicago (WMAQ), NBC 10 Philadelphia (WCAU), NBC10 Boston (WBTS), New England Cable Network (NECN), and NBC 6 Miami (WTVJ). In the coming months, it will also add NBC 4 New York (WNBC) and NBC 4 Los Angeles (KNBC).
The cool thing about this is, you can watch these channels anywhere. As they are not geo-targeted, you can watch the news from Boston while you’re in Seattle, and so forth. So even if you don’t live in these cities, you can still watch their channels. Though, I’m not quite sure why you’d want to.
This continues Peacock’s push for live content
Peacock has used a slightly different approach compared to other streaming services. While most others are looking for on-demand content that you can watch whenever you want, Peacock is also looking for live content that it can turn into channels. At launch, Peacock had channels for some of its most popular shows that just showed those episodes 24/7. Since then, we’ve seen others added like TODAY All DAy, Sky News, NBC News NOW, NBC LX, Telemundo Al Dias, Dateline 24/7 among others.
What’s interesting as this approach likely gets even more people to jump on board and watch more content than they had originally planned too. Which is good for Peacock, as they are getting more viewing time. And if the user is on the ad-supported version, that’s more money for Peacock too.
NBCUniversal is also adding some great features to Peacock for the Olympics. It’s really starting to turn around Peacock and make it a more viable streaming service. And this comes around the time Netflix opts to increase pricing.