It's Time to Start Worrying About Peacock

Last year, Peacock decided to call its Halloween hub “Peacocktober,” and I’ll admit, my first response was, “What now?” It doesn’t roll off the tongue, it’s vaguely dirty, and I wasn’t even sure what it had to do with Halloween. And yet: It managed to get my attention, and it made me want to open the Peacock app to see what shows were part of this weirdly-named collection. Quite frankly, it might be one of the only memorable things Peacock has done on the marketing front, which is why I was kinda stunned when October 1 rolled around and Peacocktober was nowhere to be found. Instead, the streamer is now calling its spooky season hub “Halloween Horror.” I guess it’s meant to be a play on the Halloween Horror Nights event at the Universal Studios theme parks, but without “nights” in the branding, the connection isn’t obvious, nor is any link to Halloween Ends. It’s just … bland and generic.

In the grand scheme of things, of course, what sort of branding a streamer uses for a landing page is of very little importance. And as this week’s Buffering explores, the Comcast-owned streamer has much bigger issues right now: It’s not growing as fast as it should be and people aren’t watching it often enough. This week’s newsletter also features a talk with CBS News legend Susan Zirisnky about producing projects for streaming and her new Paramount+ docuseries 11 Minutes, plus some thoughts on Comedy Central post-Trevor Noah. Thanks for reading! —Joe Adalian

Reach Joe on Twitter @tvmojoe or email [email protected].


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

Peacock parent Comcast typically uses its quarterly earnings reports to issue performance updates on the NBCUniversal-run subscription platform, whether the numbers are good (like last winter’s big 4 million subscribers spike) or awful (July’s big fat zero).

That’s why it was a bit of a Peacocktober surprise when NBCU CEO Jeff Shell decided to go on one of his own cable channels Tuesday to let the world know Peacock’s paid subscriber base was once again growing, telling CNBC’s David Faber the streamer now boasted “over 15 million” paid users, 2 million more than the 13 million it claimed at the end of June. “Up” is undoubtedly good, but the bigger question facing Peacock is whether these latest gains are good enough. I don’t think they are.

For one thing, the streamer got those 2 million subscribers only after implementing what felt like an everything-but-the-kitchen sink strategy to boost its numbers following the disastrous second-quarter stall. Consider all the actions Shell’s underlings at NBCU and Peacock took over the last few months to goose the numbers, as well as some of the other factors that helped drive sign-ups:

➽ As had been expected since last winter, NBCU ended a decade-long deal that allowed Hulu to stream NBC network content hours after it aired on television, turning Peacock into the exclusive SVOD home for the programming. It also clawed back thousands of hours of Bravo content that had been happily housed on Hulu for years in order to make Peacock the one-stop streaming home for Real Housewives, Below Deck, and other unscripted franchises. (Last spring, Peacock started streaming next-day episodes of all major Bravo series as well, allowing cord-cutters a level of in-season access to the network’s content they had never enjoyed previously.)

➽ In August, the start of a new multibillion-dollar deal gave Peacock streaming rights to Premier League soccer, likely attracting a slew of sports fans since many of its games are available exclusively on the platform.

➽ In September, NBCU shifted iconic soap opera Days of our Lives to Peacock, uprooting it from NBC, its home for more than a half-century. While the strategy was one that has been employed by other platforms — Dancing With the Stars jumped from ABC to Disney+ this season — Peacock didn’t announce the move until just a few weeks after the bad second-quarter numbers were released. It’s hard not to interpret the last-minute call as a reaction to the subscriber slump.

➽ Last month, Peacock also continued to take advantage of the increasingly short window between when Universal movies arrive in theaters and start streaming, premiering two of the year’s biggest box-office hits — Minions: The Rise of Gru and Jurassic World Dominion — within the space of two weeks. It also had the Sundance sensation Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul., which streamed on Peacock the same day it premiered on nearly 2,000 theatrical screens. (The streamer will execute a similar day-and-date strategy next week with Halloween Ends, the latest, and supposedly last, chapter in the Michael Myers saga.)

➽ Finally, the last quarter saw Peacock unleash a heavily marketed end-of-summer promotion allowing new users to get a full year of the service for $20 — or less than $2 per month. For the nearly 2 million regular viewers of Days on NBC, or any Premier League stans who hadn’t yet signed up for Peacock, it was a steal of a deal and the sort of loss leader designed to drive a slew of new subscriptions.

Save for the panicky nature of the Days switcheroo, all of the above actions can be viewed as smart strategy on the part of NBCU execs. Investing in sports, not selling off your best-known content to a third party, moving well-known franchises behind a streaming paywall — these are plays we’ve seen executed by numerous streamers over the years. Even basically giving away your service for a year, as Peacock essentially did by selling it for the cost of a single premium-screen movie ticket in most major cities, is not in and of itself some sort of desperate act. Hulu has repeatedly cut its price to a ridiculously low level on Black Friday, last year giving newbies the chance to grab a year of the service for $1 per month.

The problem is, despite arguably doing so much right over the summer to turbocharge subscribers, Peacock still only added 2 million more paid users. That’s half as many as it gained during the first three months of 2022, when the combination of the Olympics and the Super Bowl temporarily inflated Peacock’s subscriber base by 4 million subscribers. In other words, while Peacock once again proved it’s able to boost its paid numbers by pulling out a bunch of stops — as it did last winter — these stunts are yielding diminished returns.

Plus, while slow or stalled growth is obviously not unique to any one streamer this year, particularly in the U.S. market — just ask Netflix — unlike most of its rivals, Peacock is starting from a very small base and is priced to move. Even at 15 million paid users, Peacock is only one-third to one-fifth the size of Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, or Netflix, which in theory means it should have a lot of room to attract new users. And because its premium plan is priced at a modest $5 per month, there isn’t the sort of barrier to sign-up that HBO Max (cheapest plan: $10) or Netflix ($15.50 for the most popular tier) face. Shell is not wrong when he notes that Peacock has seen its paid user base grow by 70 percent so far this year, but it started at such a comparatively tiny base — 9 million subscribers — that it’s hard to get all too excited about the net addition of two million paid users within the past six months. Peacock’s rate of growth simply isn’t all that impressive.

What’s more, streaming industry analyst Rich Greenfield of BTIG argues it’s almost “irrelevant” at this point whether Peacock added two million or four million new subscribers last quarter because the streamer actually has a bigger headache: Audience engagement — or lack thereof. “What matters is daily time spent watching per Peacock subscriber,” he says. “From what I’ve seen, it’s very little. It makes it hard to drive ad dollars and/or raise the price if you don’t have engagement. The problem is, nobody just turns on Peacock to watch it.” Indeed, in his interview with Shell, CNBC’s Faber quoted from a Bank of America investor note which warned that because of the “small amount of net [subscriber] ads and lack of buzz around hit shows we worry that Peacock may struggle to hit engagement figures of 10 hours a month.” Shell acknowledged the importance of engagement — and then responded by changing the subject to revenue.

Peacock’s sluggish start these past two years stands in marked contrast to how quickly Disney+ grew early on. Barely three months after its November 2019 launch, the Mouse House streamer had amassed 26.5 million subscribers, the vast majority of them in the U.S. Peacock has been around for a bit more than two years now, and its paid user base is barely half of what Disney+ attained within a single quarter. You can argue that Disney is a much bigger brand and spent more on content, or that its bundling deal with Verizon inflated its early numbers. You can point, as Shell did on CNBC, to Peacock’s pretty strong average revenue per subscriber ($10, about twice what Disney+ makes). All of these things are true, as is the fact that Peacock might yet stage a rally if it’s (finally) able to launch a steady cadence of big breakout scripted series hits beyond last spring’s modestly successful Bel-Air. There are plausible scenarios where Peacock turns things around.

But at some point soon, these excuses will start to wear thin. Peacock doesn’t have to be as big as Disney+, even in the U.S.; it doesn’t need to have the reach of Hulu, which has been around forever and spends more on original content; it certainly doesn’t need to match Netflix, which is playing a whole different game. Yet you would think that after two years and billions of dollars invested, not to mention multiple exec shakeups and restructurings, Peacock would at least be dramatically bigger than the streaming holdings of the relatively tiny AMC Networks, which is about 1/100th the size of Comcast if you measure by market capitalization. And yet AMC, with just under 11 million global streaming subs for AMC+ and a collection of niche streamers such as Acorn and Shudder, isn’t that far behind Comcast’s signature streaming service.

The reality is, Peacock needs to amass some sort of scale and dramatically up its audience engagement— and do so relatively soon — if it’s going to be taken seriously. Momentum needs to be steady, and not swing wildly based on stunts or special programs like the Olympics. So far, however, even when offered all sorts of incentives, streaming consumers haven’t been taking the plunge on Peacock in the sort significant numbers the streamer so badly needs. For Peak TV audiences overwhelmed with so many choices, Peacock is just not Must-Stream TV.

Susan Zirinsky has been toiling away in the trenches of CBS News for 50 years now, having started her network career in 1972 as a 20-year-old part-time clerk for the Washington bureau where, yes, she helped cover Watergate. In the 1980s, her relentless energy and experiences covering the Capitol were quite literally used by James L. Brooks as the template for Holly Hunter’s character in Broadcast News. In the 1990s, she began a 25-year run molding 48 Hours into the true-crime storytelling machine it remains. And now, following a 29-month stint overseeing all of the Eye network’s news division, Zirinsky has settled into her next act: helping satisfy the streaming industry’s insatiable appetite for documentary programming.

About a year ago, Zirinsky partnered with the Paramount Global–owned CBS to launch See It Now Studios with the mandate of developing documentaries, docuseries, and other nonfiction content for linear and digital platforms — but with an emphasis on streaming services, particularly those within the Paramount family. Paramount+ has already launched several projects from See It Now, including a missing-persons investigative series produced with Tyler Perry; a six-part docuseries about the rise of right-wing hate groups and their role in the January 6 insurrection attempt; and one-off documentaries about Ghislaine Maxwell and the wives of Russian oligarchs. And last week, the streamer premiered the most ambitious and cinematic See It Now production to date: 11 Minutes, which explores the stories of those who survived the 2017 Route 91 Harvest Festival mass shooting in Las Vegas. Buffering caught up with Zirinsky to discuss her thoughts on how the streaming boom is shaking up the longform-news business, whether we may have reached Peak Docuseries, and why she doesn’t think TV’s love of true crime will ever fade.

Buffering: So even though See It Now is producing for all kinds of platforms, streaming has been an early focus for the studio. As someone who spent most of her long career working in linear TV news, how does streaming change what you decide to produce and how you produce it?

Susan Zirinsky: In streaming, things don’t happen overnight. You don’t green-light a project, unlike on the network, where two days later I could give you a full-fledged hour on subject X. These are much more involved. And you have to have an intuitive sensibility of what you think will resonate and how to break through the tsunami of material, what can attract people.

Is there anything about the audience for streaming that is different from linear, or anything about the platform that lets you explore stories in a different way than you could when you worked mostly for CBS?

Absolutely. I think that, first of all, the time that’s available on [network TV] now is absolutely at a premium. We did a two-hour Watergate special for the network that was very well-received and a Holocaust special that was just recognized at the Venice Film Festival. So we do produce for linear. But streaming gives you this tableau of a longer storytelling ability, whether it be a single doc or a docuseries.

If you turn on any of the SVODs and you start watching an entertainment series, what happens? You binge. And why do you binge? You binge because you become attached to the people within that entertainment show. And that is something I have noticed in the production of docuseries. I find that if there are continuing characters, which there are, that I want to be with them and I want to see the evolution of the story. You want to take the journey with the story and you want to see how it ends, which is why the binge happens … Streaming allows you to develop characters that take you through a storyline. It’s very satisfying.

Are budgets bigger for streaming versus what you’ve been used to in network TV?

Well, it depends on the project. Some things are more. I have a deal with [Paramount+/Showtime exec] David Nevins, who wanted a director so he’s helping fund it through P+. And we’re doing a feature project about Afghanistan that will come out in 2023. I’m not going to say what it is because we haven’t really announced it yet, but it’s an extraordinary project.

I’ve heard some talk among TV critics and even some viewers that perhaps streamers have become too addicted to docuseries, that ideas that would probably be best explored in a two-hour documentary are being stretched in order to increase engagement numbers for platforms. What’s your take on the trend?

First of all, I think both Terry Wrong [See It Now senior executive producer] and I look at every project, whether it comes in as a single one-off doc or a multi-episodic series, and we have to see the evolution of a story. It is not uncommon for somebody to pitch us a four-, five-, or six-episode idea and we bring it back to three or four. It’s not unusual for us to have a three, and then feel like there’s so much more material, let’s do a fourth episode. But we also do single docs. We were approached by a British company to co-produce a project with them called The Secret Lives of Oligarch Wives. We looked at it, we discussed episodic — but it was absolutely a single film and that was the decision we made.

I think every [idea] comes in as an open-faced sandwich: It comes in with the ability to add extra layers and extra bread and make it a series, or we view it and we say, “This is going to be a much stronger, 90-minute single doc.” There is no formula; there is no rule. It has to editorially have value to be episodic and to be able to carry it. There is nothing worse than getting to two episodes and you think, “We should stop it here.” We have not had that problem. We feel that everything we have made multi-episodic felt like the right amount.

It is accurate, though, that platforms right now seem to really want docuseries more than docs, right?

I think it’s fair to say that the majority are interested in episodic. But I have found in pitching to the outside SVODs and cable, they are still open to single-film ideas.

True crime is something that you were doing on 48 Hours before it was cool. What’s your assessment of the state of the genre now that it’s become so ubiquitous, especially in streaming? Is there too much of it now, or is there no such thing?

I think true crime is rich, it is provocative, and it is not going away. It is not waning. I think that the genre is like mystery books. There is something to locking yourself into an amazing story and asking, “Where is justice, and is it achieved?” You lose yourself in the story. And it crosses every socioeconomic level, like with a Tinder Swindler or Bad Vegan.

In the true-crime space, See It Now has already done Never Seen Again with Tyler Perry for Paramount+. Anything else in the pipeline?

We’re working on developing something with a U.S. Marshal who’s partially retired, and I’ll just give you the cut line because I don’t want to tell you too much about it, but he’s the serial-killer whisperer. And it’s dynamically fascinating to see the process and hear the techniques. It’s just a part of humanity, depraved sometimes, that’s fascinating.

Do you have to worry about competing for the same stories with your former colleagues at 48 Hours?

So far, no one has come to us with a pitch that is in conflict. Oftentimes Judy [Tygard, executive producer of 48 Hours] calls and says, “We can’t take this on, are you interested in it?” And we will or won’t, based on the editorial…. I have called her on some stories that I thought were worth looking into. So 48 and See It Now Studios are a deeply collaborative group. Besides, I would never hurt my baby.

Let’s talk about 11 Minutes, the docuseries about the worst gun massacre in America, which happened five years ago this month at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas. You don’t mention the name of the shooter in the project at all.

That’s correct. We did not mention the name of the shooter and that was a conscious decision.

And the series also doesn’t go deep into his motives or the still-unsolved mystery of his motive. Even though the format of the docuseries allows you to cover a lot of ground, you went in another direction. Why is that?

Well, we really wanted to do the survivors’ story, and what happens to people after it’s over. The emphasis was really more, when a seismic event like this happens, what happens to the people, the victims, the first responders, the people — just regular people — going in to help other people? Good can’t trump evil, but this is a restorative piece about humanity. Didn’t care about race, politics, anything like that. This was about people in that darkest time helping each other.

Just a few hours after last week’s Buffering went out, Trevor Noah shocked viewers — and, it turns out, his own bosses! — by telling them he’d decided to step down as anchor of The Daily Show. Late night hosts move on all the time, but they normally walk away in a much more carefully planned way, as CBS’s James Corden did last spring when he announced he wouldn’t be renewing his contract when it expires next year. As I reported earlier this week at Vulture, there’s no evidence Noah’s sudden exit is the result of any animosity with his bosses at Comedy Central. But as Lesley Goldberg and Lacey Rose detail in this excellent analysis over at The Hollywood Reporter, his decision will only deepen the identity crisis at Comedy Central, which is struggling mightily to reinvent itself as the cable ecosystem crumbles around it. Losing a host is tough, but the bigger problem facing execs is the rapid erosion of the Comedy Central brand.

Sign up to receive Vulture’s 10x10 crossword every weekday.