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$11 fees extra, speed slower, about 40 gigabyte to see details. They're not writers, but they help their clients shape their businesses' financial stories. They're not an airline, but their network connects global businesses in nearly 180 local markets. They're not detectives, but they work across businesses to uncover new financial opportunities for their clients. They're not just any bank. They are city. Learn more at city.com slash we are city. At C-I-T-I dot com slash we are city.
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil iPadell, editor and chief of the verge, and decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Matt Strouse, who is chairman of Direct to Consumer at NBC Universal. That's a fancy title. It means he's in charge of peacock and all of NBC Universal's other consumer products.
That includes everything from Fandango and its Fandango at home video service, which used to be Voodoo, to Rotten Tomatoes, to the core platforms that powers the now TV service run by Sky in Europe. That's a lot. And all of that is under the overall ownership of Comcast, which is in the middle of its own massive transition is the traditional cable TV business, Fades Away. Matt actually spent almost two decades at Comcast Proper, working on its cable products before switching over to NBCU.
And I was really interested in his view on how the economics of the TV business will shake out, as almost everyone moves over to streaming. Matt also oversees what's called the global streaming platform, which peacock and other services at Comcast run on. And I wanted to know if that big tech investment is generating the kind of economies of scale that really pay off over time. Stuff that tech companies think about all the time, but which media companies have had to learn.
And one thing that I really wanted to talk to Matt about was how peacock handled the Olympics this year. It really felt like things clicked for that platform in peacock in Paris over the summer. And the idea that all of the coverage from the Olympics could be served up in multiple different formats on demand and live really came together. It turns out that a lot of these ideas have been brewing inside of NBC for a long time, for a decade or more in some cases.
And you'll hear Matt describe how some early efforts didn't really go so well. There's a lot going on in this one tech media sports culture all at once. It's quite a ride. Our usual disclosure before we start NBCU is an investor in the virgin's parent company, Vox Media, but they have no control over our newsroom and I remain free to demand NFL games in 4K HDR whenever I want. You're on the hook now Matt. Okay Matt Strauss, head of direct consumer at NBC Universal. Here we go.
Matt Strauss, you are the chairman of direct consumer at NBC Universal. Welcome to Dakota. Thank you, you're right. It's good to be here. That is a very formal title. It sounds like you sit in a leather chair in a boardroom and just sort of issue edicts. What it means to me is that you oversee peacock. Is that really the scope of it? Well, it's a little bit broader than that. You know, maybe just to give you a little bit of background.
I actually had just celebrated my 20 year anniversary at Comcast. And so I've been at the company for quite a long time. When I came to Comcast, I actually came there as cable was transitioning from analog to digital. And it gave way to the two-way connectivity that ultimately build things like on demand. And so on demand technology is something I've been very passionate about my entire career. And was really focused on how I build that out for Comcast.
And I spent quite a number of years doing that. And then we ultimately launched the X1 platform, which was Comcast's IP set top box. Because we realized that the future was on demand. That was good to give people instant gratification. And we needed a platform to allow people ultimate control. That they could navigate all these on demand choices. And X1 became the platform where we did that. And it really was ahead of its time. Because it aggregated live and on demand and DVR and even apps.
And made them all really seamless for consumers, including the ability to navigate them with your voice, with the voice remote. Which was before even Siri and Alexa, like we were experimenting with voice. And I think as my career there kind of grew, I took on more of the role of overseeing the residential services at Comcast, which included video and broadband and phone. I got a call one day to come to NBC, which obviously is a subsidiary of Comcast.
And I got a call from Steve Berk with the time was the CEO. He had asked if I would come there to help them build a streaming service and take it to market. And I got that call on a Thursday. And Monday I showed up in New York City with my suitcase that I was ready to go. And what's very common inside of large companies in my experience is that when you're trying to build something new, it's common almost incubated. You kind of create resources.
You put a little bit of a fence around it because you don't want the day-to-day activity necessarily interfering with the ambition of trying to build a new business. And Peacock was the same inside of NBC.
But what I realized early on was that there's lots of other businesses within NBC that actually are very complimentary and can help get us more scale, can help de-risk the execution that in the ambition we had with Peacock, for example, you know, NBC owns Fandango, which is one of the largest ticketing companies. You know, they own Voodoo, which is now called Fandango at home, which has a catalog of 250,000 titles for digital purchase and rental.
They own Rotten Tomatoes, which is certainly known for moving TV reviews. You know, they also, everyone's familiar with NBC and a lot of the cable networks that we have in the United States. But NBC distributes their networks in almost every country around the world. And so what we recognized was that if we could aggregate all of these businesses under one portfolio,
it actually could give us even more economies of scale. And that's what we started to do. And so the umbrella of direct to consumers, Peacock is certainly a big piece of it. But all these other businesses, the global businesses and these other digital businesses now sit under this D to see umbrella. And they each have their own individual PNLs. But in the aggregate, you know, they reach 100 million users, they generate billions of dollars of revenue.
And they also, you know, they're available over 70 countries around the world. And so I think that that is the portfolio that I'm now managing.
And so how we then leverage that portfolio is something that I've been trying to build out over the last few years around, you know, again, trying to build one product team, one technology, one technology team, one decision science as a research team, etc. To give us kind of these centers of excellence inside of NBC as we continue to roll out, you know, our digital plans for direct to consumer.
Well, you're on the code. So I'm absolutely going to ask you about how all of that is structured and how all of those individual PNLs fight for resources. But I want to just take one step back and focus on the transition you mentioned from Comcast to NBC to direct to consumer. Broadly in the TV world, we're going from a place where big cable companies like Comcast or Spectrum or whatever had big regional physical infrastructure monopolies.
Right. You had these natural monopolies because you had wires in the ground going everyone's houses. You were the distributor. The video providers would come to you and you would resell those services. And that was a pretty good business for everyone. Now we're to place where there's multiple ways to get programming over the internet, whether it's wireless, whether it's fiber in the ground, whether it's still the cable network, whether it's other forms of broadband or starlink.
And the distributors don't have as much power over the suppliers because the suppliers can get to consumers in lots of different ways. That's the transition that you're mentioning and it has really disrupted the whole industry. How do you see peacock fitting into this at the end? Is it going to be as good of a business as the cable business was once upon a time? Because it feels like everyone is searching for a business that good.
There's no question that the cable business is a good business. It continues to be a good business. I think to answer the question, you almost need to look at it through the lens of the consumer. What I've learned is there really are different cohorts of how people consume video, how they subscribe to video. So for example, the cable customer tends to watch a lot of TV. You know, the average consumer watches about five hours a day.
If you subscribe to cable, you typically watch that much, if not more. And there's a lot of benefit of having cable because as I mentioned, if you have the X1 platform, there's a simplicity of just having all the choices in one place. It works with like 99.99% reliability. And in many cases, people are also subscribing to the bundle. So they're getting video, but then they're also getting internet. In some cases, they're getting their wireless.
And you know, the bundling, even though people tend to say they like Alacar, bundling has a lot of virtue because the more you take, the better the price. And so people who subscribe to cable and satellite today, it's not that they're not aware of other choices. They're paying in some cases for that for that convenience and that reliability. They also tend to over index in subscribing to streaming services. And so it's not one or the other.
In many cases, you're seeing that customer buying both. And so that's one part of the market. You have another part of the market, which might be more price sensitive, maybe does not consume as much video. In some cases, you know, they might watch video, but they might be spending more time on social media or video gaming or how else they're occupying their time. And they like the flexibility of being able to subscribe to a subset of services.
And in many ways, that's what direct to consumer is offering. And so there is a Venn diagram, though, here, where, you know, as a media company, you want to cast abroad enough net where you're providing a value proposition for one segment, which is like the content carnivore. But at the same time, offering the optionality. And in some cases with direct to consumer. But in many cases, there's an overlap between the two.
And so when you look at it as a portfolio, which is really how we manage the business in MVC, it's not direct to consumer sits outside of the broadcast and the cable networks. It's actually all one group. And we manage it as a portfolio. And there's examples where that comes to life like the Olympics. But I think that, you know, we're kind of looking at it in totality and that it's about giving customers choice and options.
And that's how we see ourselves growing. And so if pay TV declines and cord cutting grows, you know, we still want to service the customers who have pay TV. But at the same time, we recognize that the growth over the next foreseeable future is going to continue to come from direct to consumer.
Yeah, the last time I was a concast customer was 15 years ago, I lived in Chicago and everyone I knew was a concast customer. That was the choice in my building and most of the neighborhoods that my friends lived in. And then we all also got internet from podcasts because of what you're describing the bundle.
There was not another thing, which is the easiest next thing to do. When you describe direct to consumer, that's another distribution method, right? You're going literally directly to consumer and charging the money and then giving them services directly and you manage the customer relationship. Is that the part that's going to grow versus the experience I had when I was a concast customer and I would watch NBC five in Chicago, but concast was on the relationship with me.
You know, when you kind of study the pay TV ecosystem and kind of the trajectory of pay TV, I think it's consistently been declining, you know, year over year. And, you know, I don't think anybody really knows what, what point does it kind of start to flatten out, but I do believe that there's always going to be a fairly large group of people who are willing to pay a premium for cable for all the reasons that I said before.
And so I think that's still going to be a very, very large part of TV of the TV viewing and TV households viewing. But yes, I mean, direct to consumer is where we're really projecting the growth to come from. And certainly what's interesting about what you're putting your finger on is I actually think that there's a lot of signs of what I've learned in the cable business that I see happening in the direct to consumer business that in some ways it's going to be I think back to the future.
And what I mean by that is that, you know, people who maybe did cut the cord part of the rationale, I believe was because they thought they were going to save money by going and just getting some streaming services. And to a certain extent, that was true for some period of time, but it was very predictable that, you know, the cost of content hasn't gone down. The cost of sports rights haven't gone down. It was inevitable that prices of streaming services were going to have to increase.
And we've seen that as an industry over the past 18 to 24 months where streaming services have continued to take a rate that rates up in an effort to drive more profitability.
By the way, we're not excluded from that. I mean, we took a price increase over the summer. And so I think that that though was a very predictable outcome. The other predictable outcome for my point of view is what I said earlier, which is people watch more video than they really know, like if you look at the Nielsen numbers, the amount of time that people spend watching video has been fairly consistent over the past decade.
And so if you cut the cord and you sign up for a streaming service, you're unlikely to get your video calories as a consumer from one service. And so what happens is you subscribe to two, three. And now the average consumer is a subscribing to four or five services. And so you take these two things together where I'm subscribing now to four or five services, the rates are continuing to go up.
In some cases, you may be asking yourself, like, wait, I might be paying more and possibly getting less than what I got when I subscribed to cable. And I think that these are the ingredients in the marketplace that is driving the market to bundling. And I had talked about this five years ago that we're likely going to see an explosion of streaming and direct to consumer only to then find it almost re aggregate itself under a new bundle.
And I think there's obviously a lot of evidence over the last two years where that's exactly what's been happening. So again, in many ways, like, it doesn't change the fact that you're going to still have people who subscribe to cable or streaming or both. But I think that direct to consumer is going to be a very important component.
But I think increasingly direct to consumer and direct to consumer is part of a bundling construct is going to likely be how many people over time are subscribing to these different services, which again is is is ironically back to where everything started with cable television.
Are you seeing the growth in the bundling and are you able to maintain the customer relationship as the bundles grow. I'm thinking specifically of my customer relationship with your competitor, Max, which is somehow to this day still mediated by my AT&T account because I'm an AT&T subscriber.
And I don't think they remembered that they spun the company out. So I still have max 3 AT&T and it's actually quite confusing right because I can't adjust that account and whatever I'm just going to leave it alone. Are you seeing that sort of thing play out as you bundle as you go out to market that someone else is owning the customer for you. We might be a little bit unique. Yeah, because we actually do not have that much bundling.
The majority of our subscriber bases is direct to consumer and we have been very disciplined in how we've tried to grow the subscriber base. You know, again, if you just go back a couple of years, peacock launched in 2020. And at the time, the market was really focused on on demand scripted dramas binge viewing and most. Add free, you know, most services were chasing that segment of the market. And you know, we came to market late for being honest about it.
But one of the benefits of coming to a market late is you could assess the white space and like where you see opportunity. And so we believe the opportunity for us was to position peacock in the premium ad supported space and not just kind of focus on premium scripted dramas and movies and on demand.
Even though that is a piece of the programming strategy, but it was also about live sports and live news and unscripted programming and multicultural programming and again, playing to the strengths of of what we do as a company is a broadcast company, which was to target a broad household demographic.
And the strategy there was that if we anchored ourselves in that place, then we're not directly competing with other streamers. We're more complimentary. It was about completeness. And in some ways, being like the best of cable TV for a relatively affordable price. And we also believed that the future was not just going to be on demand, even though on demand is a core piece of the way we consume television, but that linear and live, which a lot of people four years ago were saying was dead.
Like that was just nonsense. And so that's why when we launched peacock, we wanted to have, you know, both linear networks. We've launched with dozens of linear channels. We launched with a library of 80,000 hours.
We've grown the library over 80,000 hours of programming. And we were also very intentional about it being at supported because a dual revenue stream from our point of view was better than a single revenue stream. And this is also core competency for what we do at NBC with, but having a very strong ads sales team.
And deep relationships with different advertisers. And we went to market with five minutes of ads per hour, which again was a very controversial thing to do at the time. But that's given us an advantage because, you know, it's also allowed us to focus on how do we innovate on the advertising beyond 15 to 30 seconds spots because it's been core to our DNA from the beginning.
And the only reason I'm giving you all this context is that when we built the service with that in 10, it really was different in the market. And so the vast majority of people who signed up for peacock signed up directly with the exception of concast. We did do a bundling deal with concast and they currently do wholesale peacock with certain certain of their of their packages like high and gig broadband subscribers, but the overall only majority of our sub base is directed consumer now.
To answer your question, though, like as the market moves more and more towards bundling, I do see that becoming an increasingly larger portion of our subscriber base. And again, taking the history lesson from what we know about bundling, the one thing that arguably has always held the bundle together has been sports and sports, you know, coming from that side of the business.
If you remember, we launched peacock, it was supposed to be around the Tokyo Olympics. And so live sports was always fundamental to our strategy. And we've been aggregating live sports and sports rights fairly consistently since we've launched peacock with real purpose and intention, knowing that not only is sports going to be a driver of acquisition, which has proven to be true for us.
But that sports is going to be an important component that if the market does move to bundling, that not only will we solidify our place in that bundle, but equally important, if not more important, is that you get the right wholesale economics around how you're positioned in that bundle.
And so we feel like we're in a really good position based on the trajectory that we're on, but if the market does move more towards bundling, we also feel like we're well positioned to be included in that kind of packaging. But I don't think it's going to take away from direct. It's just think for us, it's going to continue to augment the subscriber base that we currently have. We need to take a short break. We'll get more into that bundling comment when we come back.
This week on Prof. G. Markets, we speak with Lena Khan, Chair of the Federal Trade Commission. We discuss ongoing antitrust cases, how to measure consumer harm and her take on monopolies in big tech. We went through a 20 year period where the big five technology companies Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon collectively made over 800 acquisitions, and not a single one of which was challenged at the time.
And now there are lawsuits retroactively identifying that some of those were missed opportunities and failing to stop those deals had a really negative impact on the market. You can find that conversation and many others exclusively on the Prof. G. Markets podcast.
They're not writers, but they help their clients shape their businesses financial stories. They're not an airline, but their network connects global businesses in nearly 180 local markets. They're not detectives, but they work across businesses to uncover new financial opportunities for their clients. They're not just any bank. They are city. Learn more at city.com slash we are city at cit.com slash we are city.
Support for this podcast comes from Huntress. If you're a small business owner, the threat of hackers isn't just a threat. It can affect your livelihood. Small businesses are easy targets for hackers and Huntress wants to give businesses the tools to help. Huntress is where fully managed cybersecurity meets human expertise. They offer a revolutionary approach to manage security that isn't all about tech. It's about real people providing real defense.
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Huntress can empower your business as they have done for over 125,000 other businesses. Look them handle the hackers so you can focus on what you do best. Visit Huntress.com slash decoder to start a free trial or learn more. Welcome back. I'm talking to NBC Universal's Matt Stress, who's described live sports as foundational to peacock since it launched in 2020. Can I just unpack the phrase, whosoleconomics, in a slightly more mocky, velly, and way?
What you're describing is you're going to have the sports that everybody wants. So when the bundles go out to market, you will charge a higher rate or take a higher percentage of the rate people pay inside the bundle. This is classically ESPN and the cable companies. ESPN got the highest carriage rate of any of the cable companies.
I think, well, I'm describing price value and there's a high value on sports. And that's obviously manifesting itself when you just look at sports rights and the price that sports rights are going for in the market. And so essentially, yes, I mean, yes to your question that when that we see ourselves, I mean, if you look at peacock, just as an example, we have more live sports than any of the streaming service.
When you look at the NFL, the Premier League, Big Ten, the Olympics, obviously the NBA that's coming to peacock later next year. And over the course of a year, we have like some live sports 300 of 365 days. And so we didn't get there by accident. We got there through real intention. We've had a very consistent strategy and vision from the beginning. And so what you're just seeing is us executing against that strategy. We would say internally like, look, this is not a sprint. It's a marathon.
Maybe I had a sprinter space, you know, because obviously the market's moving very quickly, but we're fortunate to be part of a much broader diversified company at Comcast with a senior management team that believes in our vision and our strategy. And that's allowed us to not do things like chase low value subs or do wholesale bundly deals without the right economic relationships.
And I think it's positioned us in a really, really good way going forward because we don't feel like we have to do things artificially just to kind of grow our sub base. We want to grow so as the right or poo revenue per subscriber at the right level of engagement, you know, and build a subscriber base in the right way. And that's essentially what we've been doing. And we haven't wavered from that strategy or that vision from the beginning.
You described the different segments of the audience, right? There are some people who still have traditional and DPD subscriptions and they're just they've got a satellite box or cable box, whatever. And there's other people who are watching TikTok all day. I would segment them differently. I think you've got older customers and younger customers and the younger customers were almost certainly never sent up for a traditional multi channel cable bundle type thing.
Right. When you think about that split, that has a timeline on it. Right. You're going to lose older customers at some rate and hopefully gain younger customers at a faster rate. Are those lines going to sync up on time? Do you see the growth in the younger customer offsetting the decline in the older customer? Because what's happened lately is right when you when you talk about the decline of pay TV traditional pay TV, it's getting faster is what everybody tells me.
Yeah. Well, remember though, the decline in pay TV isn't, I mean, this may sound crude, such as because older people are passing away. I mean, some of it is people at all ages are making decisions where they might feel like it's more valuable where they want to just cut the cord so to speak and get streaming services and you could be at any age to do that.
But to answer your more broad question. Yes, I mean, that is essentially the strategy where which is why peacock exists within NBC Universal is as we see the pay TV business still being a very good business. It's still is a very profitable business for our company and we built really strong brands in the painting ecosystem that streaming is a way for us to kind of drive more growth and offset that decline and eventually become the broader growth engine for the company.
But as I mentioned before, I think sometimes it's interpreted that legacy networks are somehow like dinosaurs and that that's you know that that's that's not really where people are spending a lot of time. I see it very, very differently. I see it as a strength. You know, when you have a broadcast network and you could do something like the Olympics and you're averaging over 30 million viewers a day, that actually becomes a huge promotion of vehicle for you.
To also drive awareness and audience for your streaming service when you have networks like Bravo with really deep fandoms and you can tap into that fandom on a streaming service by making some of that content available to court cutters. It creates a little bit of an infinity loop where linear networks and pay TV can drive audience to streaming and awareness for streaming and vice versa streaming can drive people back to linear.
You know another example of this would be a show like Yellowstone, you know, not everybody maybe is aware, but Yellowstone we have the exclusive rights to stream Yellowstone on peacock. When we licensed Yellowstone, it was not the number one show in television, which is part of the reason why we got the rights to it because we took a bet that we thought it was a really good show.
But that show was on Paramount Network, which is a cable network on various tiers of cable. It's not even a basic cable network. What happened there, I think fairly predictably because it isn't excellent show is that people were finding it on streaming because we were the exclusive home for it. They were then catching up as the show progressed in its seasons and then they were tuning back into watch the new season in some cases on Paramount Network.
And then that was driving people back to peacock where maybe they wanted to watch it from the beginning or they wanted to catch up and it became this really interesting infinity loop. And this is the same thing that happened with breaking bad when it was available on AMC and another streaming service or madmen. And so I look at it very differently.
I look at it as this is a strength and if we can figure out ways to continue programming these different platforms that they can continue to drive the audiences in a way that becomes a different year and a growth engine for us. And again, it goes back to why we've organized ourselves in the way that we have, which is to really think of it as a portfolio.
Yeah, two things. One, I appreciate that you won't name your competitors. Very good. You're talking about Netflix. Two, I could talk to you for the rest of the time about Yellowstone and whether the Dutton family is rich or not, which is deeply confusing as that show goes on. I just want to be clear. They have a helicopter, but then they need to sell the car. It's very confusing. They can't pay for the gas. It's so confusing. It's a great show.
And once on as just a call of duty character, I really could just talk about Yellowstone for the rest of the time. You've talked a lot about being the place where the customer goes every day, opening the app every day, having the relationship. A lot of what you're talking about is being the interface for television. But peacock has to run on devices from Apple and Roku and Google and whoever else on Samsung TVs. All of those companies, they want a piece of your ad sales.
What are those relationships like? Are they in your way? Are they something that you're just handling? Are they not on your mind? Well, no, I think when you're looking at delivering a streaming service, we obviously need to be available on every single platform and device. But the majority of video consumption is still on the television. So these distributed relationships are really important.
And I think we have really good relationships with all the different partners. You even saw that in the Olympics like Roku, for example, built a fantastic interface to promote the Olympics. Apple and Amazon did a really great job promoting. I'm not trying to name drop any specific platform, but I think we've got the right business relationship where they're incentivized to sell peacock and participate in our growth.
And we benefit also from the placement. What I meant when I said frequency and habituation is, I think of it as like how often, nearly do you use your phone? And I could tell you the average consumer uses their phone or looks at their phone two to three hundred times a day. And you probably never turn off your phone.
I know for me, it's the first thing I look at in the morning, it's the last thing I look at at night, I even use it as my alarm clock. I never turn off my phone. Now think about your TV. Well, you probably turn on your TV when you want to watch it. And you maybe do that a couple of times a day. And then what do you do? You turn it off. And so I'm looking at it differently.
And say, what do you need to do? Where someone never wants to turn off their TV? And they want to open up our app every single day. That to me is the ambition on challenging my team to think through. And so that influences decisions we're making around that's a very different dynamic around how you program and manage a service that that's your ambition.
But that's where I think we need to go as a streaming platform. And you know, the closest example might be a show like Love Island, which was a huge hit for us over the summer. That show was on five days a week. And so that obviously required you if you were watching that show to tune in five days a week. And that is part of the habituation and frequency that I was referring to that I don't think has really discussed a lot when people are evaluating streaming services.
Let me ask you some of the decoder questions that because I think we've led up to them pretty directly. NBC Universal is a big company. You've got a broadcast division. You've got a sports division. These are old famous groups inside the company. How is your group organized within NBC Universal? Right now we are all part of, as I mentioned, the same the same group inside of which reports into Mark Lazarus and Mark Lazarus overseas.
All TV and streaming. As I mentioned, like initially it was like peacock was like its own separate entity end to end like own programming or marketing, own support services like HR and legal, etc.
Everything was kind of insulated and we have been methodically breaking down those silos. And so we really believe the opportunities to come around like more shared services. And so as I mentioned, like we now have one programming division across the entire portfolio, which reports into Donna Langley, who also oversees our movie studio.
And so now when we're making programming decisions for broadcast cable or streaming, you've got one group that's overseeing that strategy and that vision, which again, I think helps us as we make decisions around content that could potentially play across multiple platforms in different windows.
You know, we work very, very closely with the marketing department of NBC and as you probably notice, like NBC promotes peacock and locks up peacock whenever they're promoting the prime time show. And so we work very closely at the peacock marketing team works very closely with the NBC marketing team.
And we have something which we call symphony where we all contribute a certain amount of inventory that we used to cross promote across all of our platforms. And so if you're going to see a show like fight night, which is a new show on peacock from Will Packer, you know, you're going to see that promoted on NBC on our cable networks on peacock because of how we're partnering on symphony.
And we've done something very similar with like we consolidated decision sciences and research, which is really the center of gravity around all the analytics and the reporting. And so again, give one team that's looking at that holistically across linear and across streaming. And we've also is back to what I said earlier about D to C.
We have one product team and one technology team that's managing a single platform. And this is kind of a really, we haven't really talked about this publicly, but maybe it's just worth just spending one minute on what we're trying to affect you eight here is, you know, NBC, we built this part of peacock, a fairly large team of people that are building out our streaming platform, both on the product side and on the tech and on the engineering side.
Our sister company sky, which operates in the UK, Italy and Germany, predominantly they have a streaming service that you may be familiar with called now TV. And these were two different groups with fairly large teams that were building different platforms in some cases similar features.
And we recognize that there was an opportunity to consolidate it all under one team, which we did, and it's called the global streaming platform group, which sits inside of D to C. I know I'm throwing a lot of acronyms. This is what the code is all about. I'm ready for it. Okay. And so GSP is made up now of thousands of people that report into my team that are all across the world.
They're in the UK, they're in Lisbon, they're in Prague, they're in New York, they're like, we've got it, we built one holistic team. And that platform is what powers peacock, but this, but this same platform is what powers a joint venture that we have in Eastern and Central Europe with power amount called Sky Showtime.
It's the GSP platform that we've built as one company. It also powers the platform that we launched in over 50 countries in Africa through a venture that we have with a distributed platform. And we have with a distributed called multi choice. That's also the GSP platform. And next year, we're going to actually migrate now TV onto this one GSP platform. And so this has unlocked tremendous efficiencies across the company for us.
It also, I think has been like a huge motivator for the people that work on this because now they're working on one platform and it can increase the velocity where they can build things once and not have to necessarily have teams competing against each other. And in many ways, this is what positioned us so well in my opinion for things like the exclusive NFL playoff game in January and the exclusive NFL game that we had a few weeks ago in Brazil with the Eagles and the Packers.
It's also what positioned us so well as a platform in my opinion for the power of Olympics. And it's because we've had this maniacal focus on how do we get more scale more efficiency with a real, you know, commitment to like, we want streaming to work like TV. And what I mean by that is you don't think about it when you turn on the TV generally.
It's a little bit like electricity. You don't think about electricity unless there's a blackout that you think about electricity. But the electricity is with powers everything in your house.
Everything that you're using in your house is likely can be powered by electricity. And that was in a way the ambition that we had with the platform, which is can we make the platform so stable, so scalable that latency buffering, you know, crashes if too many people are using it out of sync audio with video, all the things that have played streaming for years.
Let's do everything we can to just get that right. And if we can do that in the big way, then that gives us permission then to drive innovation. And so we have been the last two years really organizing ourselves in that way building a platform because live streaming, especially if you haven't noticed, it's very hard.
But we've been really committed to that vision. And I think I'm proud of the team of what we've accomplished because it allowed us to then do something like the power Olympics, which we feel really good about because all of the things that we introduced. We've wanted to introduce for years, but we didn't believe we had permission to do that until we got what I just call the basics right and to me the basics are you.
Nothing matters from an innovative standpoint if the platform doesn't work. And so I feel like we've been very disciplined and focused on doing that and we structure ourselves around that ambition over the last couple of years. Does that product team report to you? Is that part of your group? It is. Yeah, the product begins reporting. How big is that team?
I don't think we've ever disclosed it publicly, but it's in the thousands. We've got thousands of people. It has grown considerably over the last few years. And again, I think as we built this platform and demonstrated the capabilities, it's actually allowed me to support me with other parts of our company to shift more and more resources towards the global streaming platform team.
And so this has really been the tip of the spear in how we're continuing to build out all of our technology on streaming going forward. And we work very closely, of course, with Comcast cable, who has a very large team as well, but they have been more focused on connected TVs and connected TV devices. And so there's like, there's like a complimentary nature to how we work together, but our focus has been, as you can imagine, mostly on streaming video.
Yeah, one of the things that's really interesting about what you're describing is you have a core platform and then the platform is expressed through various products, right? And so the PCOQ, the now service, whatever you're doing in Africa, do you ever find yourself just looking at the Trello board, like litigating people's priorities, like the PCOQ team wants this feature, but the now team wants another feature in the platform has to make a decision about what goes first.
Because that like every tech company looks like that. And so that's because of course, yes, which is, which is a very classic kind of challenge that you have when you become a shared service as a platform. And there's ways around that though. I mean, we do carve out the certain amount of capacity to the different services that we're supporting.
In some cases, there's commonality like sky showtime has advertising. Well, they actually benefited because we had already launched advertising on peacock. And so when they want to launch advertising in Poland, that's a relatively easy thing for us to turn on because it's already been built.
But you know, they like in Africa, just as an example, you know, the viewing behavior is much more oriented towards mobile viewing because they don't have the broadband proliferation that we have in countries like the United States. And so the majority of streaming happens on mobile devices just because of the bandwidth constraints.
And there's also different payment structures because most people don't always have the ability to like pay by the month. And so they need to maybe pay by the day or they in some cases go and they have to go to retail environments where they buy vouchers to pay. And so we have to build capabilities that are more unique to that market. And so you have to be able to arbitrage certain capacity, depending on the priorities.
But there's a benefit, which is when you build these capabilities, we're building it once. And so now we have that capability. And so if we ever wanted to introduce that functionality in other markets, it's not like we're building it once in its throw away work.
We can actually leverage it and it benefits other parts of the platform. And so, you know, it is, it is a kind of a balancing act. But I feel like generally peacock is the certainly the center of where we're focusing the vast majority of our resources.
Given the priority, the importance of it. And I would say the majority of how we're using the platform in other countries is drafting behind peacock in the peacock road map with the exceptions of some of the things that I just mentioned that I'm more unique to those markets. A lot of companies that build big expensive core infrastructure like you're describing once they built it, they want to sell it right they want to go monetize it white label it, give it to other people.
Get some more value out of the investment. Do you have enough scale with your own products and your own partnerships to support the ongoing investment here or would you go white label it to one of your partners. No, we have no ambition of white labeling it. We're being very surgical. I would say methodical on how we're thinking of this and some of the examples that I've given.
We have partnerships with the sky showtime venture is a 50 50 venture the venture in Africa that I mentioned. We have an equity stake in that venture. Obviously we own sky is a call is a broader calm cast company. And so we're I think that our ambition is not to build a white label platform. The benefit of what I'm describing is that as we've kind of created these partnerships, which is allowed me to get more scale. It also subsidizes the development for peacock.
And so by me strategically licensing our platform in the ways that I've described like it's bringing in actually another revenue stream to me that I'm then able to use to add more resources to accelerate the development. And again, all these pieces is what's positioned us in a way to allow us to do some of the big things that we've been able to do over the last couple of years around, especially around life programming.
You've described the core platform as a shared service a few times. You've described how peacock went from being inside of an incubator at NBC Universal. It's not being part of the broader portfolio. Do you think of what you're doing is the sort of tip of the spear to get new customers younger customers. Do you think eventually you'll become the center of gravity instead of a shared service or is it always just going to be part of portfolio.
I mentioned earlier that when I came to NBC from from Comcast, Steve Burk called me and I've known Steve for a long time. He actually hired me at Comcast when he was the president of Comcast. And it was kind of full circle when he asked me to then come to NBC when he became the CEO when he was the CEO of NBC. But he said something to me on the phone, which resonated, which is he said, you know, peacocks are future.
And I interpreted that not just that it's the future revenue growth or growth for subscribers. I interpreted as it's like, this is like how we could build a new culture. That's what excited me. And so, you know, part of what I'm really proud about that we've done inside of NBC since I've been there is not only established peacock is the fastest growing streamer. And you know, our last earnings, I think you know, we've had 33 million subscribers.
And you'll continue to show bottom line growth. I'm also proud of the culture that we've built inside of NBC, which to me is equally important. You know, and I've probably spent a vast majority of my time really on how we build that culture in a way that I believe is good as position us for success. And you know, it's around collaboration, it's around communication, transparency. Remember peacock was born in COVID.
We literally were I was literally in my house building a new service that I had to coordinate with hundreds of other people that were not in the same room with me. And that forced a lot of communication, a lot of transparency, a lot of trust, a lot of people feeling ownership.
And I've been doing everything I can with the help of others to foster that that sense of culture, and that started to spread into other parts of the company. And so I think from that respect, yes, I do think that peacock is in many ways trying to change the company from somebody from the inside out. But I also being respectful of the expertise of other parts of the company inside NBC. But I do think over time, you know, our future is very much anchored on streaming and peacock.
And that is it, but the difference is everyone inside the company owns a piece of that. It's not one group anymore. It's now news, sports, entertainment, every single part of our company has their DNA in some way connected back to peacock. And that is our superpower is how do we harness that power inside the company to so everybody feels ownership of it. And I think that's been probably the biggest transformation I've seen over the past four years since I've been to the company.
We need to take another short break. We'll be back in just a minute. Support for decoder comes from service now. AI is set to transform the way we do business, but it's early days and many companies are still finding their footing when it comes to implementing AI service now partnered with Oxford economics to survey more than 4,000 global execs and tech leaders to assess where they are in the process.
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This leads right into the other decoder question. You're obviously a change agent inside of NBC, right? You're going around to these groups, getting in and participate. When you are on the cable side, I'm assuming you had a different attitude towards making change. How do you make decisions now? What's your framework and how has it changed?
Well, just to take a step, I actually didn't have a different perspective when I was a cable only because over 10 years ago, I was part of a group that was nested inside of Comcast's cable, which was called Comcast Interactive Media, and we were there to disrupt the cable business.
That's exactly what we did. Being a change agent is actually something I enjoy. Being a change agent in the right way is also important, which is through collaboration, through challenging people, but doing it, I think, in a respectful way, and more of an intellectual way. Getting people to buy it, I really enjoy that aspect of the roles that I've played at Comcast and the roles that I've played at NBC.
I'm not sure if this is answering your question directly, but I think it's our goal within NBC is we want to get peacock to scale. We have subscriber targets that we want to get to. We certainly want to get to profitability. Are you profitable now? We are not profitable now, but it's investing, the way I look at it, and this is kind of something that's so interesting because, and I just ignore it to be honest with you, but you'll see press articles where it's like peacock is losing money.
We are a startup business. I've never seen a startup. You did Amazon, big money immediately. I think that you've got to have a much longer term view here, where I say, we are investing in a business. What you're looking for when you're investing in a new business is, are you hitting your KPIs in the metrics? Are you achieving the long-range plan objectives? The answer to those are, yes, we are actually exceeding those objectives, which only gives us confidence that we're on the right path.
We have a long-range plan, and we're executing against it. Getting peacock to scale, getting peacock to profitability, but again, doing it away inside the broader portfolio is really where we're focusing a lot of our resources and our efforts, and we feel really good that we're on the right path. How do you make decisions inside of that framework?
In order to achieve what I just said, if you're a subscription business, you need to say, what's going to drive acquisition, which is an important ingredient to a subscription service, what's going to drive retention and engagement, what is going to drive frequency, which is something that's not really talked a lot about with streaming services, but it's something that I'm very focused on, which is, how do you actually change the paradigm?
You want people to go into your app every single day, and again, that's not the way people typically think of streaming, because if it's all on demand or it's all binge viewing, you're essentially telling the consumer it's there whenever you want it. There's no urgency to it.
And we want to actually get people to open up our app every single day, because that just gives you more at-bats, so to speak, to try to drive them to other parts of the service, which then drives more engagement, more monetization, better retention. And so when you look at it through that lens, it drives a lot of our decision making. So our programming decisions around is, you know, what's the, it's like a mutual fund. You need a balance. It can't be one extreme or the other.
If you're too focused on acquisition, then it's a leaky bucket. You'll get a lot of people to sign up for your service, but then you'll just lose them, because you don't have enough content to engage and retain them and advise versa. You have a lot of content that drives engagement. That's not going to get you to scale, because you need to, and so we're managing almost like, I think it is like a mutual fund.
And so we have a budget, we have a programming budget, we have a marketing budget, you know, we have a PNL inside of MDC Universal that's dedicated to peacock, even though we are part of the broader portfolio.
And so we're making decisions around what do we need to do in order to achieve those goals, but I feel like we got rocket fuel because I have the added benefit of tapping into this broader portfolio that could materially add more marketing value or remember, we're the home for all the universal movies.
And so when, when Twisters or Wicked, you know, goes into theaters, you know, we're the next stop, you know, after the transactional premium transactional window, we're the exclusive home for all the next day, NBC programming, we're the exclusive home for the Bravo program.
Can I actually ask you about that real quick, because I've been very curious about this. That strategy has been tried by some of your larger competitors, Disney notably tried this max has tried this in different ways. And one of the issues there is your studio doesn't get to go to market and say, how much do you want to pay for Twisters in the first window after the pay window and get bids for Netflix and max and in peacock.
Do you have to bid? Do you win? How is that how are those economics accounted for? Well, you've probably heard this. And this is something it's funny because a lot of people don't believe this, but some of them host contentious negotiations happen internally.
And sometimes it's counterintuitive to people, but the short answer is yes. I mean, look, we have profit participants. We have to keep negotiations at arms length. And in many cases, our content is in the price of our content is being set by the market.
You know, we don't exclusively license every single piece of content on peacock. You mentioned our movies, you know, our movies, we are the first window, but then there's a pay one a and then there's a pay one b. And so there are other third parties that you know are our teams license their content to.
And so it establishes market dynamics that we then need to negotiate again. So we're paying our fair share when it comes to programming. And even in the case of the NBC next day programming, you know, that content was available before on another streaming service.
And so there was a set value that was already ascribed to it that we essentially had to step into if we then wanted to migrate that content on to peacock, which we did. And so my only point was as a company, we made the decision that we wanted to do.
That we wanted peacock to be the home for our content, which meant that we were going to also have to put our money where our mouth is, so to speak and make the investment to allow us to claw back that programming. And we've been doing that. But by doing that, it also continues to tether us directly into other parts of the company in a very positive way.
And because again, we're all working together to continue to achieve these collective goals around peacock. I do like the week treating Netflix like Voldemort. And we won't say its name. It's very good. I have tremendous respect for them. I really, I have tremendous respect for for them. And I really, I don't think a whole lot about other streaming services. And this isn't. I'm not. I'm not trying to be derogatory. Anyway, I.
You are not our first executives who will come to the competitors. We just like Greg on the show. And Netflix, the public company, we can look at their economics, their profitable, they're doing well. We can see also inside of the business, they're investing in essentially cheaper programming, right? Lots of live comedy specials, lots of reality shows. They're not doing the big premium dramas, the way they used to be doing.
You've got the big catalog from NBC. Do you, does that give you the ability to say, okay, we're going to make the money again. Like friends is long paid for that is pure margin for peacock. We're going to invest in paying more for universal catalog because I don't keep people here. Well, listen, I kind of what I said earlier, like we we're playing to our strengths. Yeah. And one of our strengths. And to be honest, I did not appreciate this when I first came to NBC.
Just how much people love the NBC content. Like, and I'm not just talking about the current programming. I'm talking about, you know, the, the deep catalog of content that NBC has. And, you know, there's a very, very large.
We have 80,000 hours of programming on peacock on demand. That has been a huge advantage, you know, to have a show like the office, Parks and Rec, Brooklyn, nine, nine, you know, to be able to have the Dick Wolf catalog of law and orders in Chicago's to have every season of SNL. I mean, these are things that again, play to our strengths that we knew drives a lot of engagement. And, and so that's been a benefit. But just back to your other comment.
When I said about consistency of vision, we never subscribe to the fact that streaming has to be just scripted dramas. Like that is a big piece of it for sure. Scripted dramas. Do drive acquisition and help with brand development. And you can almost probably think of a show that you could describe to a streaming service as. And it'll kind of like it put it on the map, so to speak, as an inflection point. So, so that was always part of the calculus for us as well.
But we always knew and believed that streaming could be so much more. And so unscripted, live sports, live news. That's been part of peacock from day one. And so arguably like it's the hunter becoming the hunted where you're seeing other streaming services. I would argue or moving more into our space that we're moving into their space. Including the fact that we've been very committed from the beginning to an ad model.
Which, you know, we believed was the big opportunity for us. Because we knew that eyeballs were going to continue to shift more to streaming for all the reasons that you said earlier. And we also knew that the majority of streaming happens on the TV, even though most people thought it happened on the phone. But the TV is like the new TV. And you're now seeing every streaming service for the most part launching an ad tier.
And so the market is evolving, but it's evolving, I think in a very predictable way. But we really have been very consistent with our vision and strategy. And I think that's actually given us an advantage because it's allowed us several years to invest in live programming and invest in advertising as part of our platform DNA, which just puts us in a very different place in our trajectory, compared possibly some other services.
Yeah, let's talk about sports and the Olympics and the NFL a little bit just to wrap up. The Olympics were a big hit on peacock. The app was ready. The features were incredible. I'm curious. There was a lot of stuff going on in peacock. You had the gold zone. You had live highlights. There was an AIL Michaels situation. There are replays. There's multiple channels. How did you integrate the product and programming teams there?
Was that a single team did the Olympics team from NBC comments say we're going to do the gold zone. Get it ready. How did that work? Well, remember it's from a product and technology perspective. It's this GSP team, this platform that I mentioned. So it's the same team. And since we're all part of the same group, we've literally sit right next to the NBC sports team and next to the NBC entertainment team.
And so we work hand in glove with these different teams. And when we brainstorm ideas and we identify where we want to go and where we see the opportunity. And I think that we kind of recognize with Paris early on, like the stakes were high. We're coming out of COVID for the last two Olympics where there was questions about the cultural relevancy of the Olympics going forward.
I think if I'm being very candid, I don't believe peacock really fulfilled the promise of the Olympics for streamers and for court cutters with Beijing and with Tokyo for a variety of reasons. But I think that there was real questions about whether or not we could really deliver the experience that we knew we needed to deliver.
And so the stakes were high and we take it so seriously, it's a privilege to work on the Olympics. That's really how a lot of us feel and it's a tremendous responsibility. And so we really set out to do something that we this was the moment where I mentioned like we thought we were ready to surprise the light and introduce features that we believe potentially could change the way people experience sports.
What I don't think people appreciate in this again is just the benefit of being a part of a bigger company is that this Paris has been 10 years in the making. So for example, when you went on to peacock and you watched a replay, like maybe you missed an event and you wanted to watch some own files, making the content available on demand and for replays, that was first done in London 2012 at Comcast.
That was the first time we made all the Olympics available on demand. When you saw the gold zone with Scott Hansen, which was fantastic and the NBC sports team did an amazing job producing that we actually tested that. If you look in Sochi in 2014, we tested the gold zone and that idea when people were watching Snoop, who became the ambassador of the Olympics, which is like a surreal thing because he became so relatable to so many people.
We tested Snoop in Tokyo in 2020, where we gave him a show on Olympic show on peacock because it was too controversial to put him on NBC at the time. And so this has been an evolution that has gotten us to this place, but it is an example where every part of the company was firing on all cylinders. It also speaks to what I said earlier, where you know peacock was the number one app. We had more digital consumption on peacock for Paris than every other Olympics combined.
And at the same time, though, there was always a question, well, is that going to cannibalize the prime time show for NBC? And that didn't happen. The NBC prime time show had a record number of viewing because people were watching on peacock during the day. But then they wanted to see the story telling that NBC does so well during prime time. And that's that infinity loop that I was referring to.
And so it really is an example of like, I think what plays to our strengths, what we do well as a company. We were preparing for years for that moment. We're really proud of what we were able to deliver. And I think in many respects, there's no going back because when you could deliver that kind of experience and you get that response, we're now looking at it and say, well, how do we then apply that to the NBA?
How do we apply that to the Premier League? How do we apply that to other types of experiences? And this is the next frontier for streaming from my point of view. Because right now streaming is arguably a two dimensional service, which is I sign up for your service based on your content and your price. I think the next iteration will be product. How do you start to use the product in a way that differentiates the experience from one streaming service to another?
We're arguably now there's more similarity than differences. The Olympics is an example of what I mean when I say the product can become part of the value proposition of where we want to go over time. If I were to project out in the future, I actually think the next version of where I then want to go with peacock and with streaming is to expand the aperture even beyond video.
And it goes back to what I said about time. How do you get more share of time? And if five hours is the ceiling for video, how do we start tapping into other ways that we can drive engagement on our platform and add more value because you know, it's not a streaming platform. It's an entertainment platform.
That's the way we're starting to think of it. And we've got lots of other parts of the company that could be leaning into how do we get more share of time, but also how do we start to get more share of wallet and like you can imagine one day, Miele that you subscribe to peacock and now you get this great video service.
But maybe if you're peacock subscriber, you get a free movie ticket to think ago, maybe if you're peacock subscriber, you get early mission to universal theme parks, maybe you know, given our advertiser relationships, maybe you get discounts to McDonald's. I mean, so we're thinking very differently, I believe in how we want to evolve the value proposition beyond just what it is today, anticipating kind of where we think we need to go as a platform.
You had a big influx of subscribers for the Olympics. How many of you retained? We've talked about this a lot of you held on to a lot of those subscribers. We haven't disclosed the number, but I guess one way to think of it is 90% of people who engage with sports on peacock watch other content. And so again, you know, we look at sports. There's no better. There's no bigger fandom than sports. And so sports, as I mentioned earlier, is a very effective tactic to drive acquisition.
We've shown that with the NFL exclusive games and NFL just regular season games. We've shown that certainly we've seen that with the Olympics, but we also have such a great portfolio of other programming. And so the way that that's manifesting itself, just to kind of build on this for a second, is that when you look at something like the playoff game that we did earlier in the year, we had the note there was the most viewership engagement we've ever had on peacock.
But the next day after the playoff game was the biggest on demand usage day we've ever had on peacock. And one of our originals, Ted, the Sepna-Cfarland show, was the number one original we ever had on peacock. And then the traders, which just actually won the Emmy for best unscripted competition show, was the number one unscripted show on peacock. And so we have the ability to bend the curve when we can take somebody who comes in for sports.
But, you know, utilize the product in a way to engage them with other content on our platform. And again, that's the benefit of having such a large catalog of programming for each individual in the home. Sports rights are getting more and more expensive over time, producing Olympics, obviously not cheap. NBC can do all this because it can monetize that in several different ways, right?
You have broadcast, which is lucrative, you've got cable, which is still lucrative, and now you have peacock. Well, peacock ever get to a place where it can support one of these large sports rights deals all by itself.
Well, if you look at something like our WWE deal, which is sports entertainment, all of those events used to be pay-per-view events, and those are now exclusively available on peacock. And that was a deal that we entered into that, even though we have a relationship with the WWE for USA, that was a decision that we made that was very specific to Jeff peacock.
But I would actually think a bit a little bit differently. We're not really focused on like sports that are unique to Jeff peacock. I think one of the benefits of being part of this bigger portfolio is we have the ability to make content like sports available on different platforms.
And when you look at something like the NBA, which we're very excited about, and obviously is a very big deal for us as a company, these rights only come up every decade. And so it's nice to have these rights back where they belong on NBC and on peacock. I think part of the reason that we were able to enter into that relationship is because we're more than just streaming, and that we have such a broad reach with broadcast and with cable.
And so I see that as a strength. And to me, that's something that I would want to continue leaning into as we evaluate sports rights deals going forward. And my belief is, most leagues see it the same way that they don't necessarily want it to be limited to streaming, because you still have such a large audience that's available on these other platforms, including Pay Television.
All right, you've walked into my trap by talking about the product and talking about sports. What do I have to do to get a true 4K NFL game on peacock? How much will I will pay you directly? Well, I don't know how to quite answer that. You just say yes. Just say yes in your heart. Just say yes. You know you want to. I do want to. And so yes, you know, we have the same ambition that you do. Like we want to offer every event in the highest.
I talk to Neil YouTube, like what's keeping you? He's like millions of partnerships and broadcaster NBC owns the whole chain. You've got the broadcast booth. You've got the production. You've got the rights directly. You've got the platform. What's stopping you? We want to make sure that when we're delivering content, especially content that's simulcast across the different properties that our ambition is we want to deliver it in the highest quality universally.
And so we're going to deliver the content in 4K on peacock. I think it's also important that we're able to deliver it in 4K to our broadcast stations and to our cable and satellite distributors. And so it has a little bit of complexity in having that focus. And so the relationships and how we approach the market is meaningful to us. And we want to make sure that we're doing it in a very comprehensive way for all of our partners, not just not just one.
But I'm your partner. And I want you to know that I want. Well, listen, I share your I share your abyssal that you're doing. We will get there. I think we've shown that we're continuing to evolve the product in the platform. Hopefully you're seeing that as a consumer and again, the Olympics. Do you see demand for higher video quality? This is the thing I worry about is that people put convenience of our quality all the time and the demand for 4K or high bit rate. It just isn't there.
Well, listen, I think I'm going to put back on my contest had. Yeah, you know, we've been delivering 4K and most people don't even know if they have a 4K television or they think they're watching in 4K and they're, you know, they're watching in like 720p. And so I don't think the average consumer generally really does understand it because it's it is confusing like what is 4K? What's ultra HD? What's HDR?
There's a lot of marketing rhetoric. And so I don't know if it's being really driven by the consumer as much as maybe a sub segment of the consumer that really is more acute to like this guy deal to notice the differences. But I but I will tell you our ambition is to offer the best and highest quality video and audio. So because to me that's an important quality of the platform. And so technically that is what we're building towards whether the consumer is necessarily asking for it or not.
We want to offer them the best and highest quality. And so that is really where we're or that is the ambition of where we're going with peacock. And I think we will absolutely get there. All right, Matt. This has been great. You got to come back when you have 4K football because that's the only thing I wanted. I did this whole conversation. Wait, I waited until the end. I want to point that out.
Well, it was a real pleasure. It was a real pleasure talking. Thank you for having me on the show. I appreciate it. I like to take Matt's trash for taking time to join Dakota and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderatthewerge.com. We really do read all the emails.
Or you can hit me up directly on Threads, a Matt Reckless-1280. You also have a TikTok. Check it out. It's at DecoderPod. It's a lot of fun. If you'd like to Dakota, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you are podcasted. Decoder is a production in the verge and part of the box-meeting podcast network.
Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt are editor as Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The decoder music is where Break Master's cylinder will see you next time.