Over at 30 Rock, the Peacock brain trust is buzzing about what they’re calling “Legendary February”—the planetary alignment of the Super Bowl, the Olympic Games, and the NBA All-Star Game. NBCU executives have placed huge bets on live sports to power the streamer’s subscription engine, premised on the notion that customers who sign up for tentpole events will stick around after. But Legendary February will be a critical test of whether that thesis bears out. Peacock, after all, is the one major streamer that has yet to turn a profit (thanks in part to its $2.5 billion-per-year NBA deal…), and it has struggled to surpass 45 million subscribers or 2 percent of total TV viewing time in the past year, per Nielsen. Even worse, while Peacock’s losses had started to narrow over the past several quarters, Comcast just reported a $552 million loss on the streamer—largely driven by those sports ambitions.

Still, sports remains one of the few major levers that NBCUniversal’s team has left to get better subscriber traction. The Paris Olympics were particularly instructive. According to reports at the time, Peacock added some 2.8 million customers during the first week of the Games, and more than 75 percent of new customers who signed up for the Games remained subscribed after 30 days. By the 90-day mark, however, that percentage had fallen to 60 percent, according to NBCU sources. By the end of the first year, about 45 percent remained. So while sports have helped address one of Peacock’s biggest top-of-funnel awareness problems, NBCU hasn’t yet cracked the secondary problem of retention.

Streaming executives partially measure the value of sports programming by assessing how many non-sports titles a new subscriber watches within 30 days of signing up. More than 80 percent of new customers who signed up due to the Paris Olympics, for example, watched five or more non-Olympics titles within their first 30 days, according to a source. That’s a strong figure on its own, but obviously, many of those subscribers didn’t find enough engaging secondary content to keep them from canceling over the following year.

Meanwhile, the streamer’s other sports bets have yielded mixed results. Fans of the WWE, whose rights Peacock acquired for $1 billion some five years ago (the deal expired in December), never watched much else outside of fight night. However, the NBA seems to be driving meaningful engagement to other titles—most notably Twisted Metal, the Anthony Mackie–led adaptation of the popular PlayStation franchise, according to sources inside the company. And unlike the Olympics, the NBA spans nine months of the year. It’s still early days for the partnership, but the league seems to be performing more like the Premier League or the NFL in its ability to drive large cohorts of mainstream audiences to non-sports content on Peacock. 

Thanks, Julia. See you all on Thursday,

John