Is Peacock doing its landing dance too quickly?
Over the weekend, NBCUniversal’s streamer delivered the most-streamed reside occasion in U.S. historical past, with its unique NFL Wild Card matchup between the Kansas Metropolis Chiefs and the Miami Dolphins averaging 23 million viewers. Instantly, the accolades poured in, with headlines championing Peacock’s success, however consultants say these viewers numbers don’t inform the entire story.
“It was additionally the least watched playoff sport of the weekend,” Ross Benes, Insider Intelligence analyst, stated. “The Cowboys sport broke 40 million.”
The matchup had all of the makings of a rankings blockbuster, in keeping with Benes, who identified the Chiefs are defending Tremendous Bowl champs and the Dolphins had one of many high offenses within the league. As well as, the sport had a Taylor Swift bump going for it, with the digital camera usually chopping to the singer sporting her Travis Kelce-themed jacket.
In fact, when the numbers got here in, the sport’s viewership fell far behind the opposite 5 Wild Card matchups, coming closest to the Houston Texans vs. Cleveland Browns and Tampa Bay Buccaneers vs. Philadelphia Eagles video games, which each averaged 29.2 million viewers throughout streaming and linear.
“They in all probability misplaced at the very least 10 million viewers by making it streaming unique,” Benes stated, noting viewership additionally got here in from native tv. “I do need to throw a little bit chilly water on the NBC press launch and say it was probably the most streamed occasion, however it was additionally the least watched sport as a result of it was streaming solely.”
To date, the dropoff to streaming-only video games continues to be important.
For instance, Prime Video’s unique Thursday Night time Soccer streams averaged 11.86 million viewers per sport, which was up 24% yr over yr, in keeping with information from Nielsen. Nevertheless, this season, NFL video games have averaged 17.9 million viewers general.
However because the business continues its shift to streaming, Benes says there’s a precedent for fulfillment.
“Again when NFL video games began going to cable, totally on ESPN, there was an enormous dropoff. When ESPN obtained Monday Night time Soccer, the rankings had been down in comparison with once they had been on broadcast networks,” Benes stated. “However folks obtained accustomed to that.”