Peacock’s Olympic Redemption

We’ve still got a few days left, but the 2024 Olympics will definitely go down as ratings win for NBCUniversal. Comparing this year’s Games to past ceremonies is difficult for a host of reasons: More viewership has shifted to streaming, and NBC is telecasting events which take place in the evening Paris time live during daytime hours here in the States and repackaging them for primetime. So while a cursory look at Nielsen same-day linear primetime ratings would show Paris telecasts usually drawing slightly fewer viewers than Tokyo on many nights, things look dramatically different when you add together the audience for NBC’s live daytime coverage of primetime in Paris with the highly-produced version of those same events and then add in people who watch Peacock and cable coverage in primetime.

NBC calls this its “total audience delivery” rating, and by that yardstick, viewership is up nearly 80 percent over the same benchmark during Tokyo and seems poised to match or maybe even exceed the very successful ratings for the London Games in 2012, as well as the less successful 2016 Rio Olympics. I’ll have a more complete report over at Vulture when final ratings are in next week. As for today’s newsletter, we’re sticking with the Olympics theme: I had a long conversation with a couple of my Vulture colleagues about how NBC’s coverage has been going, and why Peacock is much improved since the last time it streamed the Games. I’ve also got some thoughts on the latest financial results from Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery.

Meanwhile, a quick plug for a newsletter I’ve never read but have zero qualms recommending: Status, from longtime CNN staffer Oliver Darcy. The man behind the network’s Reliable Sources newsletter today announced he was leaving the company to launch Status, which will be a daily newsletter reporting on the media business. In addition to frequent scoops, Darcy has been a leader on calling out misinformation, particularly from Fox News and Elon Musk. I’ve never signed up for something so quickly. Thanks for reading. —Joe Adalian

Reach Joe on Twitter @tvmojoe or email buffering@vulture.com.


Enjoying Buffering? Share this email with your friends, and click here to read previous editions.

Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery both announced quarterly earnings this week, and the main takeaways from the two reports could not be more different. At the Mouse House, they were breaking out the extra fancy cheese to celebrate an important milestone: For the first time since jumping headfirst into the direct-to-consumer space five years ago, Disney’s streaming business turned a profit. It was pretty small, by Disney standards — $47 million — but CEO Bob Iger hit this goal a few months ahead of schedule, and after years of bleeding cash on streaming, any win on this front is worth noting. And while Disney reported some less upbeat news from its Parks division, its blockbuster machine is once again purring along, with Inside Out 2 and the new Deadpool movie dominating the box office.

Wall Street analyst Michael Nathanson this week argued that this theatrical success will have a halo effect that lifts D+, even suggesting that it might be time to start talking about another “Disney renaissance” at its studio division. “These theatrical hits are what keep Disney’s content flywheel spinning,” he said in a report to clients. The streaming availability of “the original Inside Out helped drive Disney+ sign-ups and viewing. In future quarters, these hit blockbusters should further benefit DTC plus Consumer Products, and eventually in Parks.” Now if Iger could just find a suitable successor, he might finally be able to retire in peace come 2026. (For more on that matter, check out this week’s episode of Land of the Giants: The Disney Dilemma, where I go deep on Disney’s succession problems.)

Someone else who probably should be considering retirement right now but almost certainly won’t — at least not voluntarily — is WBD’s David Zaslav. His company, which at this point might as well rename itself The Struggling Warner Bros. Discovery,lost $10 billion during its most recent financial quarter — most of which was chalked up to a $9.1 billion write-down related to its TV networks division. Zaslav and Co. blamed the numbers on the continued collapse of the cable business, but while there’s no doubt cable is hurting, WBD has also done a staggeringly efficient job of stripping its storied Turner cable networks of whatever value they have left.

CNN, TNT, Turner Movie Classics, Cartoon Network — all have wilted as Zaslav slashed budgets, fired staff and reduced original programming. And then, in his latest masterstroke, Zaslav declared that TNT didn’t need the NBA to thrive, and then, after the NBA called his bluff and moved its business to NBCUniversal and Amazon, he decided to shell out what will probably be millions of dollars in legal fees to sue the NBA. You don’t need to be some sort of corporate genius to figure out why WBD’s stock price this week (at one point it fell to under $7) is half what it was a year ago, and just one-third of its value in spring 2022 (just shy of $25). Translation: WBD, which was worth about $50 billion when it debuted in 2022 (after merging with Zaslav’s Discovery Networks), is now valued at just under $19 billion. Even 2005 George W. Bush would have trouble praising this sort of performance.

For decades now, complaining about NBC’s coverage of the Olympics has been so intense and dramatic, it could almost be an Olympic sport itself. Whether it was the ill-fated Triplecast back in 1992, the #NBCFail hashtag of London 2012 or the COVID-plague mess from three years ago, loud grumbling about some aspect of the Games has arisen more often than not. But that doesn’t seem to be the case with Paris 2024: While not every single thing has gone perfectly, the buzz around NBCUniversal’s presentation of the summer games has been… pretty good!

Unlike in previous years, you can watch big primetime events like gymnastics live on the NBC network as they happen, rather than being forced to wait until the tape-delayed broadcast at night or figure out Peacock. While Peacock’s offering certainly has its flaws, the app has definitely gotten easier to use than in 2021 and 2022, and its offering — literally everything going on in Paris — is comprehensive. And Gold Zone, one of the key features of Peacock’s presentation, has become a breakout star in its own right. Obviously it’s helped tremendously that athletes from the U.S.A. and around the world have been showing up with a parade of jaw-dropping athletic accomplishments. But viewership for this summer’s Olympics are way up over three years ago, and a key reason is because NBC’s offering is actually good.

While I’ve caught some of the Games, I am not an Olympics Person myself. So to get a better sense of whether the upbeat chatter about Paris I’ve seen online matches with reality, I enlisted the help of two of my colleagues who have been breathing in all things Olympics for the past two weeks — Vulture critics Jen Chaney and Nicholas Quah. Earlier this week, we compared notes, and it turns out, they were pretty psyched about NBC’s presentation, too.

Joe Adalian: OK, so let me start by asking how much Olympics coverage have you been consuming on average each day — and where are you watching? Peacock, NBC, cable?

Jen Chaney: I have the Olympics on pretty much all day. It’s usually on in the background during the morning and afternoon, unless I have to watch something else for work. And I have surprised myself with how much of the primetime coverage I have watched on NBC, probably at least three hours a night. (Pole vaulting! Get into it!)

I have been consuming Olympic content all across the board: on Peacock, NBC, and other cable channels like USA and E! Peacock is very good at comprehensiveness, but as the Olympics go on, I find myself more often waiting to see key events during NBC primetime, especially when I miss something that happened live early in the morning. Yes, things get spoiled for me — I knew Simone Biles fell off the beam early Monday and didn’t watch it happen until that night. But that’s fine.

I feel like I get a good overview in the primetime broadcast, plus the added bonus of witnessing, say, Snoop watching dressage set to the tune of “Gin and Juice.” He and Flava Flav have been the non-athletic heroes of this Games, which is wild for those of who remember the ‘90s. Related: I am watching the US women’s water polo team playing Hungary right now on E!, and I don’t understand why they do not have a picture-in-picture situation that captures Flavor Flav’s reactions to every moment of the game. As good a job as NBCUniversal is doing in handling the Olympics, there is always room for improvement.

Nick Quah: Oh, God. About the same intensity as Jen. Well, sort of. I’m based in the Pacific Time Zone, so I’m a little bifurcated: a lot of Olympics stuff is happening on my screens in the morning through to the early afternoon, which is when France goes to bed, and then I throw on primetime programming or encore broadcasts through my YouTube TV account in the evening. (The exception, of course, is whenever surfing comes on.) The platforms I watch on are divided in much the same way: Peacock in the morning, the various NBCUniversal channels at night.

The NBC primetime programming is less my speed. I’m a sports sicko, and while I enjoy the player packages and seeing Martha Stewart paired up with Snoop Dogg in Paris, what I’m really here for is to drop in on a random sport that I have little to no experience in and inexplicably develop strong emotional investment in random people very quickly. Just the other night, I threw on skeet shooting, which I’ve never thought much about before, and had the time of my life marveling at the robin’s egg blue shotgun used by the Brit, Amber Rutter, who I thought really should have won it. (She got silver.)

This is probably why I spent most of my time on the Gold Zone stream. It’s great for sickos like me. I like a good buffet, and boy do I like being ping-ponged through different events happening at the same time. And the thing about this buffet is that once I have a taste of a particular dish, I kinda wanna try more of that cuisine. Anyway, this is all a long-winded way of saying: Peacock rules.

Adalian: I am not a big consumer of the Olympics, but, yeah, most of what I have seen has been via Peacock, too. Has it been easy to use and easy to find what you want to watch quickly on there?

Quah: Yes and no. Generally speaking, give or take a few stability bumps, I’ve been happy with the platform and the experience of the hub that it’s created for Olympics programming. That said, this is mostly because I’ve been taking a lean-back approach: I go in and wander, waiting for anything that catches my eye. The few times I went in to look for something specific — badminton, for example, which is a sport I do follow pretty closely — it can be a bit of struggle to track down the exact replay I want. It’s a little easier to navigate on my desktop than on my Apple TV, and that likely has a lot to do with what Jen called its comprehensiveness. Streaming services still haven’t figured out how to smartly present a vast selection, especially when you’re toggling through options on a remote, and this is just a continuation of that design challenge.

Adalian: Right. That’s my chief rap against Peacock. There’s almost too much there, and it can be hard to know where to start. I honestly wasn’t even sure what the heck Gold Zone was until I started hearing people rave about it, and that’s on Peacock for not using its UI to sell it. As much as people hate autoplay, I think there’s a case to be made that Gold Zone should start playing as soon as you open up Peacock, the way channels autoplay on Peacock. Or, even if it’s not launched as soon as you open the app, it should definitely be on continuously when you enter the Olympics vertical on Peacock. I also think it’s a mistake to not clearly identify what time events aired on NBC or USA or E!, or any time periods at all. I don’t know if everyone knows this, but some of the events are replays or simulcasts of what’s on NBCU’s linear channels, while others are just the international feeds — stuff you can’t get on TV. Peacock should draw a firm line between what’s on TV at that moment (or earlier in the day) and what’s bonus.

Chaney: Joe, I totally agree with you about Gold Zone. Peacock needs to do a better job of telegraphing what it is, because it is a really useful way to watch the Olympics. But the promo photo on the platform often features four male broadcasters and, no offense to any of them, but I found the image off-putting and not at all a reflection of what Gold Zone actually is.

I tend to use Peacock when I’m looking for something specific, and like Nick said, it can be frustrating in that regard. During the tennis events, a lot of matches wouldn’t be labeled with who was playing, so it was challenging to find the ones I wanted to watch. If you’re trying to toggle between events, I think the two best options are the multi-view option on Peacock or, even better in my opinion, switching between cable channels. I know I sound ancient when I say that, but streaming has yet to create something as seamless as the good, old-fashioned remote that lets me hop instantly from NBC to USA to E! and back again.

Adalian: I’ve only seen a bit of Gold Zone, but I was blown away at how addictive and wonderfully produced it was. I am not a sports guy, but I was immediately drawn into the action of basketball and women’s soccer (or football as those overseas call it). It’s all killer, no filler. I definitely plan to watch more, and like Friend of Vulture Andy Dehnart, I think we need a Gold Zone for reality TV…and news and primetime shows and basically everything.

Quah: So, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that my enjoyment of Gold Zone comes out of a pre-ingrained behavior: I watch a lot of Red Zone, which is the obvious reference point, during a standard NFL season. That modality works for me partly because I don’t have a specific team to root for — I wasn’t born in the States — but mostly because I’m interested in the league across the board.

Same goes with the Olympics. Sure, as a newly minted American, I’m somewhat following Team USA’s various adventures, and as a native Malaysian, I’m also following what few events Malaysia has competitors in. But most of the time, I’m just interested in sports across the board, and Gold Zone is basically a learning tool to help me “get” a sport. Most of any given sporting match can be pretty dull, especially for newcomers. But by zooming into an exciting moment, you’re often seeing the most desirable seconds of a new sport. Which is incredible — and educational!

Chaney: I agree with everything Nick said, although I feel like I use the cable channel flipping for more of the reasons that Nick is using Gold Zone. But obviously not everyone has cable, so if you only have Peacock, I think it’s the best way to get that broad overview that Nick appreciates. I go to Peacock mostly for the specific — that is how I was able to watch trampoline over the weekend, a sport the networks pretty much never cover.

Adalian: Let’s talk more about Peacock’s overall presentation. We all seem to agree it could do a better job at making it easier to find things. Is there too much content, or too many options? I get the desire to have clips on the platform, but having them mixed in with full-length telecasts seems less than ideal. People can go to social media for clips; Peacock should better replicate the linear experience, in my opinion. But as Jen said, maybe that just is because I’m (just) outside the adults 18-49 demo. What advice would you give Peacock’s designers to make things better? And also: How has the app been from a technical point of view? Do things load quickly and without a lot of, ahem, buffering? [Pause for laughter.]

Quah: The clip thing is so weird. To some extent, its foregrounded presence seems to presuppose the assumption that you’re either doing a lot of Peacock watching on your smartphone (which feels unlikely?) or you’re down with watching highlights on TV in the social media-esque manner (which also feels unlikely?). I have trouble believing it’s getting much use, and I’d be interested to see data indicating otherwise.

My thinking with Peacock, and streaming platforms in general, is that “too much content” is always a huge part of the value-add. I know the utility of overabundance is a little overshadowed by fatigue these days, but I happen to think this is just the result of long-tails and archives not being properly exploited. I agree that there are ways Peacock’s Olympics offering should replicate linear broadcast more, but I also think it should be more aggressively contextualized in a way that understands the modern streaming experience to be two-fold. The top billing stuff should be one aspect of the experience and the “infinite universe” should be another, equally important aspect of the experience; both things serve different types of audiences (normal people for the former, sickos like me for the latter).

And as easy as it is for me to say it, my main note is that both areas need to lean deeper into themselves: The top billing stuff should be more like linear (to your point, Joe), and all the other stuff just needs to be more searchable.

Chaney: I have been watching Peacock through my Apple TV and it has not been glitchy. My son, sometimes watching through a smart TV in another room, has complained about occasional slowness. As far as having too many options, that’s just inevitable with the Summer Olympics. There are so many events and if you’re going to cover it comprehensively, as Peacock is, it’s almost impossible to avoid the notion of “too much.”

What Peacock can do better is highlighting the best stuff more prominently. Joe, I like your idea about autoplaying a major live event on the home screen, the same way Netflix autoplays whatever show it’s promoting on its home screen. That would do a better job of drawing people into what’s happening and conveying that Peacock offers a live and dynamic experience.

It makes sense for the interface to enable you to scan through all the sports. I wish they would more prominently highlight specific athletes as well. I should more easily be able to go to a Simone Biles or Katie Ledecky page on Peacock that allows me to save all their events to the “my stuff” feature so I know exactly when they’re competing. I also think there should be a way to personalize the multi-view option so that a viewer could choose the four different live events they want to watch and load them all onto their screen. The great benefit that streaming offers over broadcast is customization and I’d love to see Peacock do more to take advantage of that.

Adalian: So one thing that’s different this year is that NBC made the decision to carry major primetime in Paris events live in the U.S. — not just on streaming but on the NBC broadcast network. You can watch the big events playing out at night in Paris in the afternoon here, as well as in primetime. That’s something they’d avoided doing in the past. Did they make the right call?

Chaney: It was absolutely the right call. It does not seem to have had a negative impact on the primetime ratings, which have been really strong. And I just don’t see a downside to offering viewers as many ways to watch as possible. That’s what people want: options.

Quah: Oh yeah, right call. Two thoughts on this. First, my gut tells me that there are scores of more people watching television during the workday than ever before. You’ve got remote workers, you’ve got people working in settings where there are televisions, you’ve got smart souls sneaking a screen on their work computers. Second, it would’ve been a mistake, even an abdication of duty, as a modern media company to stack the deck for primetime in this day and age. You have to acknowledge that large swaths of the viewership are already engaging with live events somehow, even if just on social media. Limiting it to just Peacock would’ve been a half-measure.

Adalian: Completely agree. It’s annoying to me that those of us who live out west still can’t watch the heavily produced primetime Paris package at 5 p.m. Pacific, when it’s airing on NBC and streaming on Peacock for folks back East. That’s an affiliate thing, and those affiliates need to realize it’s not 1994 anymore. But other than that, at least people who want to watch everything as it happens can now do so. Anyway, let’s get to the bottom line. Taking into account both Peacock and the quality of the actual coverage, what overall grade would you give to how NBC Sports has handled this Olympics? And how did you get there?

Chaney: I give NBC a B+, downgraded from an A- only because I thought the announcing during the opening ceremony was such a miss. I love Kelly Clarkson, but she does not need to be involved in Olympics coverage. Overall though, the primetime broadcasts have done exactly what they should do: show the events people are really excited to watch (swimming, gymnastics) and serve as a digest of other major moments from the day that you may have missed. And Mike Tirico continues to be an effortlessly informative, engaging host.

Quah: You know, I’ll give it an A- for pretty much the same reason as Jen, except that I thought the chaos was a plus. Sports, the Olympics, games of human athleticism — it’s all ultimately as ridiculous as it is wonderful. While you need a Mike Tirico in there to give us the poetry, you also need a Kelly Clarkson to cut that portent down.

Adalian: I haven’t watched enough to give them a grade, but what I have seen, I’ve enjoyed. I continue to be blown away at how advanced graphics technology has gotten — it can be so helpful to illustrate how various sports work or how certain moments came together for an athlete. And I think the video packages and music have all been great — though, as a purist, I’d prefer they use an old-school orchestration of the John Williams Olympics theme rather than the updated one you hear at the start of “Primetime in Paris,” which feels like it was cut from a bad Michael Bay movie. The Olympics are all about tradition, and this one needs to be respected for the big primetime show.