I got an email the other day telling me that I could get Peacock for 99¢ a month for 12 months. More than anything, this tells me that Peacock is barely surviving. At a time when top premiums are adding low-cost ad-supported tiers, Peacock’s proven that you need more than an ad-supported tier to succeed. I know that I wrote less than two months ago saying that they might have gotten it right. Seems to me now, that maybe they didn’t.
What does this tell us?
A lot of folks will tell you that the economy is slowing. Tech giants and entertainment giants are shedding jobs. There’s a little more to the economy than that, but this isn’t that sort of blog. So let’s keep focused on tech and entertainment. We know that these sectors swung big during the pandemic, ignoring the bottom line to build strong brands. We know that players like Amazon and Disney were practically indispensable in those days. But thankfully people are shopping in person now and visiting each other. So it’s not surprising that some companies are beginning to shed some extra weight.
It’s easy to see in retrospect that Peacock didn’t invest big. They were an early loser in the pandemic because of when they launched. The 2020 Olympics were supposed to be their big coming out party. Those Olympics were postponed a year, leaving Peacock with reruns of The Office and not much else. Their Universal movies were largely already contracted to other studios so it took a while to get any real movie presence on Peacock.
A weak salesman
It was the classic film Ruthless People who introduced me to the idea that it’s a weak salesperson who drops their price at the first sign of trouble. (Of course that’s been a business axiom for a lot longer.) Peacock didn’t have a lot of ability to drop prices. They launched with a free tier, which admittedly didn’t have a lot of stuff. Their ad-supported tier launched at $4.99 with a launch promotion of $49 a year. I’d say there’s not a lot of room to cut prices at that point. Consider that Disney, HBO Max, and Netflix have much higher-priced ad-supported tiers.
Yet here they come with a deal that gives you a year of ad-supported Peacock for about what you’d pay for two coffees at Starbucks. They can’t possibly build a strong brand for that kind of money, could they? I can’t see how. I mean, consider too that most Xfinity customers, of which there are millions, get Peacock ad-supported for free. How much cash could this generate for them?
No, it’s a weak play for sure. It’s an attempt to get attention, and they’ve gotten mine. They’ve also gotten the attention of other blogs. But will it pay off? Once people get to Peacock, what will they find? The streamer has been holding on to the exclusive for Jurassic Park Dominion and they’re the exclusive home for Nope, at least at the moment. But they decided to give up the excellent Girls5Eva. They have no Olympics to feature in the short run. Why this move now? How could it possibly succeed for them?
Gotta hope
Yes, I’ve had mixed feelings about Peacock since its launch. I tend to think that Comcast could build a better network considering their vast library. I like the low price and the fact that there is at least some sort of free tier. But I don’t know where they go from here. You have to hope that they are making money from advertising because they’re no way they’re keeping the doors open for under a buck a month per subscriber.
