Happy Monday War & Peaceniks! Let’s count!
This month, NBC aired/released/produced the first-ever exclusive streaming NFL Playoff game, on Peacock. According to NBC, the Wild Card game became the most-streamed live event in US history.
An average of 23 million viewers watched the game on Peacock and across NBC’s streams. It’s a massive audience by modern television standards - especially considering that just to watch the game, viewers either had to subscribe to Peacock, go to a bar, or mooch off a friend.
Given the friction, an audience of 23 million, 8 million more than the previous record for live US streaming Thursday Night Football on Amazon, and 6% more viewers than the equivalent playoff game in 2023, is quite a score for NBC and Peacock.
I guess?
Peacock’s playoff was a Prime Time game, on a Saturday night, and the coldest day of the winter, with the current Super Bowl Champs and reigning MVP, and the AFC’s buzziest team. Yet, it drew 17 million fewer viewers than the 4:30p Sunday game on FOX. Is that success?
What does success even look like for a streaming football game behind a paywall?
When trying to assess the Peacock Wild Card game’s performance, we have to note that Comcast paid $110 million for the rights to stream the game behind Peacock’s paywall. NBC ran the game with 40% fewer ads than usual NFL games with no ad breaks in the fourth quarter, and the game was sponsored (ironically) by Amazon, Geico and Hotels.com. So it’s hard to know how the game’s ad rates compared to broadcast. No matter how many people watched the game, or at what CPM, a HUGE measure of the success of this experiment will be the number of new subscribers Peacock signed up (and ultimately retains) as a result.
Which begs a much larger question: In the new era of TV, what measurement matters now?
I’ve written that data will be the star of the upcoming Upfront, and that this year, business outcomes are the new black.
Yet, as we navigate this Media Universe, we are inundated with meteor showers of metrics, making it harder to know how to measure success in today’s complicated User-Centric Era - to know which party’s data should be counted first.
Should we measure streaming TV the same way we measure broadcast? NBC clearly wants us to, shouting about their “record-breaking” streaming/viewer numbers, seconds they got the data - to much derision from fans who paid for that one game and couldn’t wait to cancel…
Or, as I’ve suggested, should we measure success in terms of outcomes and return on marketing investments? Should we land somewhere in between?
Television measurement today is as fragmented as its viewership. This is not accidental.
Different publishers count differently, the many platforms measure in myriad ways - each for their own reasons. As consumers of data, of Media, and especially of advertising, when we read headlines about results… WHO chooses WHICH metrics and WHY matters.
Case study: FAST.
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