Peacock Reveals New Features For Summer Olympic Streaming

NBCUniversal is adding a set of features to Peacock as it gets set for the streaming outlet’s live coverage of the Paris Olympics this summer.

At the company’s One24 tech showcase Wednesday, execs touted the new aspects of the streaming experience for both consumers and advertisers. Peacock will carry more than 5,000 hours of live coverage, including all 329 medal events, in Paris from July 26 to August 11.

Two new features of note are Live Actions and Discovery Multiview, which is aimed at helping viewers find and engage more deeply with Olympic programming. The former lets viewers select events during live and primetime coverage and create their own feed comprised of only the sports they are interested in seeing. During live coverage, viewers can either keep watching live or stay with “whip-around” coverage. In the social media era, the time-tested whip-around approach has come under scrutiny given that results are often known, sapping coverage of drama.

Discovery Multiview is designed to help viewers track a handful of the up to 40 simultaneous live events in a single frame. Up to four competitions in sports such as soccer, track & field and wrestling will be available within the same screen. YouTube TV and others have gained consumer traction with the concept in recent years, but Peacock will be the first standalone streaming app to offer a multi-view experience, NBCU says.

Peacock’s history with the Olympics, a cornerstone of NBC and NBCU programming for more than 30 years, was initially fraught. The service launched in spring 2020, but the expected boost from the Tokyo Olympics was delayed by Covid until the following year. The coverage in that debut year was then criticized by many viewers and media observers for being difficult to navigate and incomplete, owing in part to a strategic bias toward linear networks and the NBC broadcast flagship. The Beijing Winter Games of 2022 brought a complete revamp of the strategy, with all events carried on Peacock.

While Peacock continues to lag major rivals like Disney+ and Max in terms of subscribers, it has posted steady gains in recent quarters. NBCU parent Comcast reported in January that it ended 2023 with 31 million subscribers.