NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable
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Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Matt Strauss, who is chairman of Direct-to-Consumer at NBCUniversal. That's a fancy title. It means he's in charge of Peacock and all of NBCUniversal's other consumer products. That includes everything from Fandango and its Fandango at Home video service, which used to be Vudu, to Rotten Tomatoes, to the core platforms that powers the Now TV service run by Sky in Europe. That's a lot, and all of that is under the overall ownership of Comcast, which is in the middle of its own massive transition as the traditional cable TV business fades away.
Matt actually spent almost two decades at Comcast proper, working on its cable products before switching over to NBCU. And I was really interested in his view on how the economics of the TV business will shake out as almost everyone moves over to streaming. Matt also oversees what's called the Global Streaming Platform, which Peacock and other services at Comcast run on. And I wanted to know if that big tech investment is generating the kind of economies of scale that really pay off over time. Stuff that tech companies think about all the time, but which media companies have had to learn. And one thing that I really wanted to talk to Matt about was how Peacock handled the Olympics this year. It really felt like things clicked for that platform and Peacock in Paris over the summer. And the idea that all of the coverage from the Olympics could be served up in multiple different formats on demand and live really came together. It turns out that a lot of these ideas have been brewing inside of NBC for a long time, for a decade or more in some cases.
And you'll hear Matt describe how some early efforts didn't really go so well. There's a lot going on in this one. Tech, media, sports, culture, all at once. It's quite a ride. Our usual disclosure before we start, NBCU is an investor in the Verge's parent company, Vox Media, but they have no control over our newsroom, and I remain free to demand NFL games and 4K HDR whenever I want. You're on the hook now, Matt. Okay, Matt Strauss, head of direct-to-consumer at NBCUniversal. Here we go. Matt Strauss, you are the chairman of direct consumer at NBC Universal. Welcome to Decoder.
Thank you, Eli. It's good to be here.
That is a very formal title. It sounds like you sit in a leather chair in a boardroom and just sort of issue edicts. What it means to me is that you oversee Peacock. Is that really the scope of it? Well, it's a little bit broader than that.
You know, maybe just to give you a little bit of a background, I actually just celebrated my 20-year anniversary at Comcast. And so I've been at the company for quite a long time. When I came to Comcast, I actually came there as cable was transitioning from analog to digital. And it gave way to the two-way connectivity that ultimately built things like on-demand. And so on-demand technology is something I've been very passionate about my entire career and was really focused on how I build that out for Comcast. and spent quite a number of years doing that. And then we ultimately launched the X1 platform, which was Comcast's IP set-top box, because we realized that the future was on-demand. That was going to give people instant gratification.
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