NBC NBA media rights key for Peacock streaming growth

Executives at Comcast‘s NBC Sports targeted the NBA’s media rights renewal on their calendars for years. They wanted the NBA back after losing the games to Disney in 2002. But it wasn’t until this January that NBC Sports President Rick Cordella became confident the company could go big on a bid.

On Jan. 13, NBCUniversal’s subscription streaming service Peacock showed its first-ever exclusive NFL playoff game — a 26-7 victory by the eventual Super Bowl-winning Kansas City Chiefs over the Miami Dolphins. There was little doubt the game would be popular. It reached 27.6 million total viewers, according to Nielsen, the biggest live-streamed event in U.S. history.

What happened after the game made NBCUniversal comfortable with shelling out a whopping $2.45 billion per year to distribute NBA games starting in the 2025 season — a bet on making Peacock profitable as the pay-TV model erodes.

Research firm Antenna estimates Peacock added 3 million new subscribers from getting the rights to that one NFL game, which cost $110 million. More than 70% of those subscribers stayed with Peacock about two months later, Antenna said in March.

That gave Cordella confidence NBA fans would stick with Peacock even after the season concluded. But it wasn’t just the lack of churn that convinced him of the value of popular sports. It was what those new subscribers watched once they signed up.

NBC Sports executives assumed the millions of new Peacock subscribers might engage with other live sports on the service, which include the NFL’s “Sunday Night Football,” golf, Premier League, WWE, and IndyCar. What they didn’t expect was how much subscribers watched the platform’s non-sports entertainment, such as movies and episodes of “The Office,” “30 Rock” and “Parks and Recreation.”

“Our highest video-on-demand usage was the week after the Wild Card game,” Cordella said in an interview. “Churn rates among those new subscribers have been lower than the average. Sports fans are not monolithic. You’re getting a whole household to watch other entertainment around what NBCU has.”

Media executives broadly understand the traditional pay-TV ecosystem will continue to shrink in the coming decade, and their companies will need to rely on streaming to survive and flourish. For NBCUniversal,…