Why Peacock is making a huge bet on YouTube

Today, I’m talking with Matt Strauss, who is now chairman of the NBCUniversal Media Group. This is Matt’s second time joining me on the show, and there’s been a whole lot of organizational and structural change at NBCU since the last time he and I spoke just two years ago — pure Decoder bait.

First, about a month after Matt was on the show, Comcast spun off most of the NBCU cable channels into something called Versant. That’s when Matt’s title changed from heading up just the direct-to-consumer offering — meaning Peacock, plus some other streaming services — to heading up the whole thing, across all distribution. And now, Comcast is spinning off the NBCU business entirely into a whole new standalone company.

That’s a lot to have going on all at once! And meanwhile, it’s only just this year that Peacock became an actual profitable business at all — and it’s still pretty far away from being anything like the juggernaut that Netflix is.

But what NBCU has, and what Peacock has, that the rest of the streaming industry is still trying to wrap its head around, is live sports. Sports are huge. They held up the cable industry for years, they held up broadcast, and now they’re the big thing that could make streaming a winner for NBC.

One thing before we start: You’ll hear me ask Matt about the red company and the blue company. That’s just my way of getting Matt to talk about Netflix and Skydance, the company that now owns both Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery. I think he did a good job playing along.

Before we get going, do me a favor and subscribe to Decoder on YouTube, where we put out new episodes every Monday and Thursday.

Okay: Matt Strauss, chairman of the NBCU Media Group. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Matt Strauss, you are the chairman of the NBCUniversal Media Group. Welcome back to Decoder.

Thank you so much, Nilay. It’s great to be back.

I am very excited to talk to you. There’s a lot going on in the media. It is a tumultuous time in Hollywood. I have to tell the audience that you and I are speaking minutes after Anthropic filed its S-1, and all of humanity is going to be turned into AI. Who knows what entertainment we’ll be watching in the future?

There’s a lot going on. Let’s start at the very beginning of this. You have a new job since last time you were on the show. Last time, you were the head of Direct-to-Consumer — you were basically the head of Peacock and the other apps inside the family. Now you’re the chairman of NBCUniversal Media Group.

What’s the new job? What does that mean?

NBCUniversal Media Group is comprised of certain services within NBC. It’s the broadcast network, it’s Bravo, it’s Peacock, it’s NBC Sports. We also have NBC News and Telemundo. One of the things that we recognized, especially when we spun off some of our cable assets last year into Versant, was that the assets we had truly worked better together. NBC has been like a megaphone. Given the reach of NBC, it’s been incredibly strategic in growing Peacock, which is a bit ironic because I think so many people believed that broadcasting was a bit of a relic of the past in this digital world, but it’s actually proven to be the opposite. As things have gotten more fragmented, having a broadcast network is actually a superpower because we’re continuing to see ratings growth. That has been really helpful as we’ve been building out Peacock.

But actually, Peacock was also finding new audiences, like cord cutters or people who maybe didn’t grow up watching NBC or some of our cable networks. So, Peacock’s also been really strategic in reaching and driving people back to NBC and Bravo. So, I think that flywheel is where we recognized that we needed to start operating differently. I’ve been a huge advocate of what I like to call “centers of excellence” in how I like to structure the business, which is, content first and platform second. How do we get maximum reach, maximum engagement? That really required us thinking differently about how we were running the business.

Essentially, instead of having a programming group within broadcast and a programming group within streaming, we just collapsed the business. Now you’ve got one programming team, one marketing team, one product and technology team, one decision sciences and research team, and one advertising team. They’re all incentivized around continuing to grow the portfolio, get that maximum reach, maximum engagement, and drive top-line revenue. I think that structure, which we put in place about 18 months ago, is contributing to a lot of the success that we’re seeing now.

Even if you look at 2026, NBC is the number one network in total viewers. We had an unbelievable early part of the year with “Legendary February,” which you might remember. That’s when we had the Super Bowl, the Milan Cortina Olympics, and the NBA All-Star Game. In 17 days, we reached over 225 million viewers. This summer, we had Love Island, which was the number one show of the summer for streaming. You had the World Cup, which was the number one Spanish-language sporting event in US history on Telemundo and Peacock. We had a show called The Five-Star Weekend, which was our number one scripted drama.

Now, we’ve led ourselves into the fall, where we have Sunday Night Football, which has been the number one show for 15 consecutive years. We had a great kickoff with over 25 million viewers. We just had the NBA tip-off last week with the Knicks and the Sixers, which is the number one rated tip-off in NBA history. So, it does feel like we’re firing on all cylinders in how we’re trying to operate with this, again, content-first-platform-second mantra.

But just to go one level deeper, a big part of this strategy is figuring out how do we move audiences across platforms. For example, when I mentioned that Love Island was the number one streaming show of the summer, 40 percent of those Love Island viewers also tuned in to watch the World Cup. So, migrating viewers back and forth across the portfolio is a critical part of how we see ourselves continuing to grow. But to effectuate that, you need to structure yourself in a way where people are incentivized along that vision. We’re still evolving as an organization, but I’m really proud of some of the milestones and accomplishments that we’ve made as a team. I love my job. I feel like I’ve got the best job in the industry at the moment.

It is a tumultuous time in Hollywood, and you seem like one of the happiest people in the industry right at the second. That is very notable. You’re a Decoder pro, you brought up structure. I’m dying to ask you about the Decision Sciences Group. That’s the other question I ask everybody.

But let me just back out for one second. You’re describing quite a lot of freedom in rethinking how something like NBCUniversal would work. You mentioned the Versant spin, so CNBC, MS Now, and a bunch of channels went that way. I’m on its networks all the time. I would describe the folks at Versant as feeling more free. They’re disconnected from the battleship that was Comcast and NBCUniversal. They can go try whatever they want to try. They’re energized by it in some ways.

Then, Comcast looked at NBCUniversal and said, “We’re going to spin off that off as well. We’re going to be the cable business and NBCUniversal will be the entertainment business, and now you’re in charge of that.” You’re like a 20-year Comcast veteran. I think you got your start doing cable boxes.

Yep. I started in 2004 at Comcast.

Just tell me about that process. We spun off CNBC and MS Now into Versant. Now we’re looking at this company. We ought to spin off NBCUniversal as well. Just tell me about how that came about. What was that moment like? Did you all sit in a boardroom? Did it come down from on high? How did that happen?

Well, that decision really was made by Brian Roberts and Mike Cavanagh. Candidly, I was not in the room when that decision was made, but I think if you were to ask people at NBCUniversal, it makes strategic sense.

Do you feel that same sense of freedom?

You know what? I think that there’s an energy. When people show up here, they feel very passionate about what they do. They believe in our strategy, they believe in our portfolio. Look at NBCUniversal more broadly. Before, I was describing the Media Group, but that is one piece of the broader company. You have Universal Pictures and Universal Television, which have obviously been having an unbelievable summer with The Odyssey and Obsession. You’ve got Universal’s theme parks and experiences. We opened up Epic Universe last year. We opened up a kids theme park in Texas. We announced we’re going to open up a theme park in the UK. We have Sky, which was part of the company but more squarely sat within Comcast Cable. Now that’s going to migrate over to the new NBCUniversal as part of this restructure. Then, you have these media assets, which I spoke about earlier.

So, you’ve got this unbelievable portfolio. I think that people here really believe in our growth and that if we’re a separate company, it’s going to allow us to move faster. It’s going to let us have more clarity around where we want to make capital allocations and decisions. There are a few areas that really play to our strengths as an organization. One of them is live sports and live events. That’s always been a part of NBCUniversal that we’re really known for. If you just look at the sports portfolio that we have, Nilay, we’ve got NFL, NBA, MLB, the Big Ten Conference, the Premier League. We’ve got the Olympics with the IOC. You’ve got this unbelievable portfolio of sports content, and that’s a strategic asset when we’re partnering with the leagues because we believe in broadcast. We believe in broad reach. We’re not trying to put everything exclusively on a streaming platform. In 2026, we’ve demonstrated across almost every single sport that we can actually continue to grow ratings and reach new audiences, which is something that’s becoming more and more complicated.

Can I ask about that? Because you also run Peacock, which is a paid streamer where you can access sports. When you say grow ratings on broadcast, are more people putting up antennas to watch sports over the air?

No. What I mean… By the way, about 20 percent of TV households in this country do still use over-the-air antennas as—

Oh, we have lots of listeners who are going to tell you that’s the best picture quality you can get.

Yeah. It is amazing picture quality, especially if you live in the right look angle where you could pick up the signal.

It comes back to what I said earlier about managing as a portfolio. We don’t think of it as a broadcast business sitting next to a streaming business. We really position ourselves as a digital-first company trying to get that maximum reach. When we look at the ratings, we’re combining what you would think of as more traditional ratings for linear television with streaming and all of our digital platforms. Whether that’s DVR or TV Everywhere, we aggregate it into one platform. When you look at it through that lens, which is just audience, we’ve actually demonstrated that across almost every sport — NFL, NBA, or MLB — the total viewers that we are reaching now are, in some cases, the highest they’ve been in decades.

Even the Super Bowl, which we had earlier this year on NBC, reached about 137 million viewers at its peak, and that’s across all of our platforms. That Super Bowl was the highest-rated live event in NBC’s 100-year anniversary, which is this year. It’s kind of counterintuitive, but what we’re showing is that when we start operating as one, we can reach new audiences and we can aggregate them. We are demonstrating that not just across sports. There’s even something like the Thanksgiving Day Parade, which has been an institution on NBC for 99 years. This past Thanksgiving Day Parade was the highest-rated parade we have had in the company’s history. So, there’s a renaissance happening around live. In a world of instant gratification, on demand, and watching what you want when you want, the fact that you’re now seeing more and more viewers wanting the collective consciousness of social viewing, things that still matter in today’s society, that actually plays to our strengths. And we’re seeing that manifest itself with higher ratings.

But as I mentioned, it’s also a big part of our strategy. It was a big part of our Peacock strategy, which was a bit of an anomaly when we launched Peacock six years ago. It’s also a huge part of what I think NBC does well, which is that we create these big tentpole events and we’re able to shine a light on them and get huge audiences that are continuing to show up, even in a world of fragmentation and cord-cutting.

It’s interesting that you’ve described it as content first and platform second, and then you’re describing your approach to ratings as agnostic to distribution. You’re just sort of combining everything and saying, “This is the number of people we reached.”

Well, take something like the Milan Cortina Olympics. This is an interesting example. If you were to look at that Winter Olympics, we had roughly 3,200 hours of content. There’s no way we can make all of that available on one network. There’s no way to daypart 3,200 hours. If you remember what we did with the Paris Olympics, we made the decision to make every event available live. When you make it all available live, we put it all on Peacock. This was a very controversial decision because the question has always historically been that if people tune in to watch this live during the day on Peacock, are they going to tune in to watch NBC primetime? Are we going to cannibalize our ratings or are we going to grow the ratings? This is where we really tested this strategy. If we’re truly indifferent, then what should happen is that we should be able to expand the funnel during the day, get more people into the Olympics, and try to create an experience that we’re very proud of.

We really do believe, whether it was the Gold Zone or Multiview, that we were able to surprise and delight viewers and make it really easy to navigate and find all of the choices on Peacock. But then what happened was that people were tuning in to watch NBC during primetime because there’s a difference between what NBC does and what Peacock does. NBC was more about storytelling. It was more about, “Let’s talk about what happened today. What about the backstory of the athletes? How’s Mike Tirico going to address his perspective on things?” When you combine these two things together —  putting all the content on Peacock and then having the primetime show —  this Winter Olympics had about a 96 percent higher rating. About 25 million viewers were tuning in to watch the Milan Cortina Olympics, which was about 96 or 97 percent higher than Beijing. On the digital side, it was double the digital minutes of every other Winter Olympics combined. We also doubled the advertising revenue.

You’ve got to be willing to break some glass. This is going to seem so obvious, but it starts with the consumer. It starts with, “How do we approach the consumer and give them the best experience?” And if you build it, they will come. The only reason I’m using the Olympics as an example is because if you were to look at the past, this was a real pain point where we didn’t make everything available on streaming or it was confusing for some viewers to figure out how to navigate all of the choices. We really, as an organization, decided to put our shoulder behind this, and I think the results ultimately speak for themselves. But again, it ladders back up to this vision of really starting to manage as one portfolio. If you can drive that maximum reach and engagement, that’s also going to be where you’ll get the best monetization.

The Verge team in particular was addicted to Gold Zone, which was the whip-around coverage of every medal event. It was very fun.

Let me ask you about this. A big Decoder trope is that your distribution fundamentally affects what you make, right? That the medium is essentially the message, and I know what a YouTuber makes because they’re on YouTube, and I know what a TikToker makes because they’re on TikTok. I could stretch this all the way back and say I know what broadcast TV looks like because the medium of broadcast TV has fundamentally shaped the content that gets made there. I know what cable shows on Bravo look like, and they’re not the same thing and they haven’t been for a while.

You’re describing, “We’re going to bring programming in, we’re going to centralize that, we’re going to be agnostic to distribution — or indifferent I think is the word you used — and that’s going to increase viewership.” But the pressure of the different distributions is still there, right? Running the broadcast network over the air is still different and reaches different people than distributing on YouTube TV, than running Peacock as a paid platform unto itself. How do you manage that tension? Because it is real.

Yeah, it is very real. It’s a really insightful question. The tension is real, but actually, I don’t view it as tension. I view it as an opportunity because you’ve got different audiences. If it’s a Venn diagram and you look at who’s the audience on broadcast versus the audience on cable versus the audience on streaming, there’s some overlap, but it’s not as much as you would think. That actually speaks to this broader strategy, which is, “How do we reach?” If we reach all these different viewers but they’re on different platforms, how do we start bringing this together into one?

Now there’s multiple ways to effectuate that kind of a strategy. One is you start sharing content and window content differently across platforms. For example, we have a show on Peacock called The Paper. Greg Daniels created it, who also created The Office. It’s a really great comedy and it’s an original. If you were to look at how streaming services typically make originals available, they’re exclusive. You premiere it on your streaming platform, and it typically stays on that platform forever.

What we’re starting to experiment with is, well, what if we premiere The Paper on Peacock but then introduce it onto NBC six months later? Now you’re bringing a show that was created for streaming and making it available on NBC to a new audience. You also have this added message, which is that if you want to watch next week’s episode now, go get Peacock. All of a sudden, NBC is not only reaching new audiences but it’s also becoming a sales channel for driving people back to sign up for Peacock.

Do you give that to Greg Daniels? The feedback loop of a YouTuber is so blunt. I’ve made a handful of Instagram Reels in my life. I literally open and look at the retention chart and think, “Oh, I should put another hook in there in the middle to keep my viewers,” and it’s immediate. That’s not even how my brain works. It’s immediate that the data makes you think this way. If you say to Greg Daniels, “Hey, make sure episode two of The Office ends on a cliffhanger so that I can advertise watching the next episode right away on Peacock.

Well, Donna Langley, who oversees all of the entertainment programming, would be the one calling Greg Daniels and giving him that feedback. But here would be a different way to answer that question. I don’t think we’re necessarily trying to change the framework of how some of the shows are being created on NBC or Peacock. There’s still something about premium content and how that’s being created that I think resonates with a lot of people.

But here’s what we’re thinking differently. Take a show like Saturday Night Live. We had the 50-year anniversary for SNL a couple of years ago, and it’s unbelievable what Lorne Michaels has created. You still have SNL that’s on at 11:30PM ET, but what if we now take that content and we format it for vertical video on Peacock? We know that there’s a whole cohort of people that are watching on their phone, holding it vertically, and likely using their forefinger or their thumb to navigate because of TikTok or Reels. They’re watching a show like SNL on YouTube in some cases as well. Instead of trying to recreate or tell viewers how to watch the content, why don’t we just take that content and reformat it in a way that’s more akin to them? So now, you can go to Peacock and you can watch content in a vertical video format. That may not be for you, but it might be for somebody else who wants to swipe from sketch to sketch because that’s how they enjoy it.

Let me give you another example, which is sports. I mentioned earlier about how we tried to introduce new features around sports because it’s such a passionate fandom. You can’t change the way somebody watches an NBA game. People want to watch an NBA game in the way that it was produced, but the lines are getting blurred around what’s a live event and what’s a video game, especially if you grew up playing NBA 2K. We’ve introduced something called Performance View, which is on Peacock. You could watch the NBA game or you can enable Performance View. If you enable Performance View, an overlay comes down on top of the game, and now it looks like a video game where we’re pulling in real-time sports data from sports radar, calculating the probability of somebody making a shot, using graphical overlays to show the trajectory of the ball, or putting the names over the player’s heads just so it’s a little bit easier to follow what’s going on.

You’re not changing the core production, you’re enhancing it. The enhancement of all these types of tactics and features — whether it’s through something like Performance View, something like I’m describing with SNL, or it’s rethinking the windowing of the content —  is allowing us to reach new viewers but also allow them to consume the content on their terms. And the way you watch may be different than the way I watch, and we’re just trying to give viewers different choices to enhance their experience.

One thing I always think about in terms of distribution is that every distribution channel is more or less valuable. The monetization is more or less lucrative. I can make 1 million Instagram Reels today and they will make me $0. But more people will see my face, and then maybe I will sell them a The Verge subscription, the Decoder book, or whatever it is in the future. That’s the creator economy, right? It’s 10 million little ad agencies. Instagram doesn’t pay for the content, and they all have to monetize it some other way.

Then there’s, I don’t know, Peacock or Netflix where I pay a subscription fee and the content is there, so there’s that monetization model. There’s the movies. You can go and pay to watch one movie one time and that’s going to be very lucrative for Christopher Nolan —  maybe nobody else, but it’s very lucrative for Christopher Nolan. Which one is most valuable for you? You’re describing everything, but some have to make more money than others and some attract more new audiences than others. You’re trying to bring people from the biggest audience to the most revenue.

I want to give a lot of credit to our ad sales team and Mark Marshall, who oversees ad sales. Several years ago we recognized that if you really want to have this kind of a strategy and vision (like I said, content first, platform second), you need to become almost agnostic around where the consumption is happening. We made the decision to actually sell as one portfolio. When you’re buying advertising, we are combining the audiences across broadcast, cable, streaming, and digital, and that’s how we sell it and go to market. That’s actually been the way that we’ve been doing this now for several years.

Is advertising the number one line of revenue here? Because on cable, when you were part of Comcast where I’m sure the rates were not as high as you could get now that you’re split, Comcast just paid you carriage fees.

We are a dual-revenue stream business. Advertising is very much a material part of the overall revenue stream, not just of NBC and cable but of Peacock. If you remember, this was a big part of our strategy when we launched Peacock six years ago because the streaming market was very foc