Peacock gained 3 million subscribers during the first week of the Olympics. Will they stay?
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- Peacock gained 2.8 million new subscribers during the first week of the Paris Olympics.
- This matches the number of sign-ups for a single NFL playoff game streamed on Peacock in January.
- Comcast/NBC paid over $1 billion per Olympics for streaming rights through 2032.
The Paris Olympics was a big hit for Comcast and NBC: Viewers loved the games, advertisers paid big money to get in front of them, and chatterers praised the tech behind it all.
One thing we didn't know until now: Would the Olympics convince people to sign up for Peacock, the Comcast/NBC streaming platform that provided comprehensive coverage of the games?
The answer seems to be yes: Peacock signed up 2.8 million new subscribers over the first week of the games last month, per Antenna, a subscription tracking service. (The games ran from July 26 through August 11; Antenna hasn't released statistics for the games' performance in August.)
For context: That's the same number of people Antenna thinks signed up to watch a single NFL playoff game in January.
Comparing the two events is a little tricky: On the one hand, the NFL is America's most popular TV programming, hands down. And the playoff game Peacock streamed also featured Taylor Swift and her boyfriend.
On the other hand: While the Olympics can't compete with the NFL for sheer star power and fan interest, it's the rare multi-day event that gives lots of people lots of entry points: Maybe you cared about gymnastics, or men's basketball, or you simply wanted to know more about Raygun, Australia's baffling entry into the breakdancing competition. So it kind of makes sense that both events would draw similar numbers of signups.
More context: Comcast/NBC reportedly paid north of $100 million for the rights to stream the NFL game; it is paying license fees of more than $1 billion per Olympics to show and stream the games through 2032.
The one thing we still won't know for some time is how many people who paid for Peacock to watch the Olympics will keep paying for the streamer afterward — a key issue for every streamer except for Netflix.
Antenna had previously estimated that 29% of NFL sign-ups had canceled their Peacock subscription a couple months after the game — a bit better than the average Peacock sign-up.