Peacock’s NFL Wild Card Game Experiment

NBCUniversal and the NFL certainly turned heads when they announced the AFC Wild Card Game would be available exclusively on Peacock. NBCUniversal has stated that the January 13 matchup between Kansas City and Miami was the biggest live-streamed event in U.S. history and drove internet usage in a single day in the U.S. to a new record. But did it also drive subscriber growth to record levels?

It did. In fact, it was the single biggest subscriber acquisition moment ever measured by Antenna.^* Antenna will officially report January 2024 data in mid-February, but based on our preliminary analysis, Antenna estimates a total of 2.8 million sign-ups to Peacock over NFL Wild Card Game weekend. 

Using a comparable three-day window, Peacock’s Wild Card Weekend game drove more sign-ups than past Super Bowls that were available on SVOD platforms, albeit non-exclusively. 

Time will tell how many of these subscribers Peacock retains. But Antenna data has shown that certain sports-motivated subscribers can be more loyal than the average subscriber. 

For more detailed information on Antenna’s methodology and definitions of core metrics, please visit http://www.antenna.live/methodology.

^{*While the launch of Disney+ in 2019 saw more than 2.5 million sign-ups in a single day, no other singular programming event has resulted in this many sign-ups to a service in a three-day period.}

^{(Editor's Note: The chart that originally accompanied this post mislabeled the three-day sign-up figures for both Super Bowl LVI and NFL Thanksgiving, FIFA World Cup, and Black Friday by switching the numbers included in the call-out boxes. The chart has been updated and we regret the error.)}