Can Peacock sustain new subscribers through Paris Olympics?

As one of the first big streaming platforms to air major live sports packages like Sunday Night Football , the NFL playoffs, Big Ten sports and the English Premier League, NBC Universal’s Peacock has been an object of fascination within the media business.

After Peacock aired the most-watched streaming event in history earlier this year with a Wild Card round NFL playoff game, the platform surprised the NFL and the industry by retaining more NFL viewers as subscribers than expected. But on an earnings call this week, NBC Universal reported losing 500,000 subscribers last quarter even as its Peacock business pushes closer to profitability. Churn is the boogeyman in the streaming world, and it’s still too early to measure how many subscribers Peacock will keep from its exclusive NFL games.

With those trends in mind, NBCU media group chair Mark Lazarus appeared on The Town podcast with Puck’s Matt Belloni on Wednesday . He discussed the company’s strategy to retaining all the new Peacock subscribers it figures to pull in by streaming every single event of the Paris Olympics on the platform, and what it learned from the NFL Wild Card game that will inform that strategy.

“We learned how to market and make sure people knew what to expect when they got (to Peacock),” Lazarus explained. “We also learned, once that game is over, how do we make sure we retain those customers? And that’s by having content that they care about or that fits what they might look for.”

Peacock has a quietly massive library of popular content, between sitcoms like “Friends” and “The Office” and soap operas like “Days Of Our Lives” as well as films from its Universal Pictures studio and the WWE in addition to its live sports rights in football, basketball and soccer.

Lazarus and the NBCU team know Olympics viewers this summer need to be pushed toward different content than NFL fans were in the winter. Still, Lazarus said most subscribers pulled in for sports will likely be retained through non-sports programming.

“We did a great job retaining the NFL audience, and in fact 9 out of 10 hours that the football fan watched over the next month … were entertainment programs, things not related to football,” Lazarus said.

“(With) the Olympics, we anticipate a slightly different audience. The NFL is a huge and diverse tent and everyone comes in … we think the Olympics will be the same thing. It’s a little more female than other sports, it’s a different kind of audience who search for different types of product … so we have content that’s going to come after that.”

The important thing to remember is that while losing 500,000 subscribers in Q2 may seem like an ugly moment for Peacock, as Awful Announcing’s Andrew Bucholtz wrote in his explainer on the earnings call on Wednesday, Peacock started from just shy of 3 million added subs for the NFL game. Even if it loses another chunk of that over time, NBCU is still looking at a net gain of more than a million subs from the playoff game.

Can it do the same with the Olympics, which offer thousands of hours of content across several weeks? While Olympics viewers may be more casual and varied, that fits right into Peacock’s wheelhouse given its breadth of content and genres.

Because Peacock is ahead of other major streamers in their live sports acquisitions, it offers a weathervane for the industry when it comes to attracting and retaining subscribers around a constant offering of big-time sports events. The Olympics will be the latest test of their effectiveness in doing so.

[ The Town with Matt Belloni ]

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