Yahoo News 71% of Signups for Peacock’s Exclusive NFL Playoff Game Have Stuck Around
The Kansas City Chiefs weren’t the only big winners of the NFL’s Wild Card Weekend (and, ultimately, its entire season). With the first-ever streaming-exclusive NFL playoff game, Peacock added 3 million new signups. (Earlier data had the number at 2.8 million over three days.) With Peacock’s free-trial option blacked out for the Chiefs vs. Miami Dolphins, all of those were paid subscribers. They didn’t dine and dash.
New research from Antenna finds that an impressive 71 percent (2.13 million) of those new Peacock users were still around by the end of February, nearly seven weeks after the game. Peacock ended 2023 with 31 million subscribers. The service lost $825 million over the final quarter of ’23, and there is still no timeline on Peacock turning a profit. (Even Paramount+ has one of those.)
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Even before it was adjusted up from the initial +2.8 million subs, Dolphins-at-Chiefs was the biggest SVOD subscriber-acquisition-moment ever observed by Antenna, which has been in the streaming-measurement game since 2019. (The biggest single day for streaming signups remains Disney+ launch day: with 2.5 million signups in 2019.)
Miami vs. Kansas City was the largest live-streamed event in U.S. history, and January 13, 2024 marked our biggest-ever day for internet usage. The game consumed 30 percent of U.S. internet traffic; 16.3 million devices were concurrently using Peacock.
The game averaged 23 million viewers, according to Nielsen, counting Peacock, the NFL+ app, and local television in the Miami and Kansas City markets. (While the game was a Peacock exclusive, you still cannot black out local fans.)
Peacock was not the only streaming app to cash in on football over the past few months. Since CBS has Super Bowl LVIII’s broadcast rights, Paramount+ had the streaming honors.
Super Bowl LVIII was (basically) the most-watched program in U.S. history, and it drew an estimated 3.4 million sign-ups to Paramount+, Antenna estimates. Paramount+ did allow for those on a free trial to watch the big game; 2.3 million of those 3.4 million signups, or 68 percent, took advantage. That means 1.1 million paid.
Here’s a chart that shows signup activity for both Peacock and Paramount+. You’ll see some pretty flat months, then some extra activity during the NFL season, and finally two big spikes for the key games.
Paramount+ kept 65 percent of its Super Bowl signup cohort through February, many of whom converted from free to paid. There’s one caveat here: Antenna does not yet have a retention estimate for those who signed up for Paramount+ through iTunes, which they believe to be at about 21 percent. We’ll get that data in April.
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