The head of direct-to-consumer video at NBCUniversal says the cable business is good and streaming is great.
Today, I’m talking with Matt Strauss, who is the chairman of direct-to-consumer at
U is an investor in The Verge’s parent company, Vox Media, but they have no control over our newsroom, and I remain free to demand NFL games in 4K HDR of their executives on my show whenever I want. You’re on the hook now, Matt. Okay, Matt Strauss, head of direct-to-consumer at . What I realized early on was that there’s lots of other businesses within
distributes their networks in almost every country around the world. We recognized that if we could aggregate all of these businesses under one portfolio, it actually could give us even more economies of scale, and that’s what we started to do.
5 in Chicago, but Comcast owned the relationship with me? I think when you kind of study the pay-TV ecosystem and the trajectory of pay-TV, I think it’s consistently been declining year over year, and I don’t think anybody really knows at what point does it start to flatten out? But I do believe that there’s always going to be a fairly large group of people who are willing to pay a premium for cable for all the reasons that I said before.
Universal — we see the pay-TV business still being a very good business. It still is a very profitable business for our company. And we’ve built really strong brands in the pay-TV ecosystem that streaming is a way for us to kind of drive more growth and offset that decline and eventually become the broader growth engine for the company.
promotes Peacock and locks up Peacock whenever they’re promoting their primetime show. We work very closely, the Peacock marketing team works very closely with the Universal, to now being part of the broader portfolio. Do you think of what you’re doing as the sort of tip of the spear to get new customers, younger customers? Do you think, eventually, you’ll become the center of gravity instead of a shared service, or is it always just going to be part of the portfolio? I mentioned earlier that when I came to
since I’ve been there is not only established Peacock as the fastest growing streamer, and our last earnings, I think you know, we’re at 33 million subscribers and continuing to show bottom line growth. I’m also proud of the culture that we’ve built inside of . I’m not sure if this is answering your question directly, but I think it’s our goal within
next-day programming, that content was available before on another streaming service, and so there was a set value that was already ascribed to it that we essentially had to step into if we then wanted to migrate that content onto Peacock, which we did.
has. We have 80,000 hours of programming on Peacock on-demand, and that has been a huge advantage. To have a show like The Office, Parks and Rec, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, to be able to have the Dick Wolf catalog of Law and Orders and Chicagos, to have every season of . I mean, these are things that, again, play to our strengths that we knew drives a lot of engagement. That’s been a benefit. We never subscribe to the fact that streaming has to be just scripted dramas.
sports team did an amazing job producing that, we actually tested that, if you look, in Sochi in 2014. We tested the Gold Zone and that idea.
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