Peacock Struts; A Rallying Cry For SMBs

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Peacock Takes Flight

Peacock launched on Wednesday as a free add-on for Comcast Xfinity and X1 Flex subscribers. The NBCU-owned service will launch nationally on July 15 with an ad-supported option and a premium tier at $4.99 per month. NBCU stuck to its original launch date despite the pandemic, but with production on pause will rely on its catalogue to draw viewers. Peacock has 10 sponsors committed to long-term deals. “We believe there is this void of premium, ad-supported content in the streaming market,” said Matt Strauss, chairman of Peacock and NBCU Digital Enterprises, on a press call. “We’re actually seeing advertisers gravitating toward wanting to work with us.” Peacock will limit ad load to five minutes per hour, and has more distribution bundles in the works.

Shop Small

The potential closure of so many restaurants and local businesses is driving interest in how people can support smaller companies, since people are being forced to spend more online while sheltering at home. “If we want more than Walmart, Amazon and McDonald’s in our economy, our behavior can make a difference,” as The New York Times put it. Pinterest is introducing curated collections from small and independent sellers for Pinterest Shop, the marketplace it launched last November. More importantly, organic searches on Pinterest for “support small business” increased 351% in recent weeks. Etsy is also running a new “Stand With Small” digital video campaign this month, and is waiving $5 million in ad credits for sellers on its platform.

Dream To Stream

Netflix and Amazon Prime are the business beneficiaries of people being stuck at home, even compared to cable TV. They’re winning most of the additional viewer hours. And on top of that, big movie studios are forced to sell more and more content to the big streaming players, since they have to scrap their theater release plans. Even companies with their own television networks are turning to the online platforms. Paramount Pictures, which is owned by ViacomCBS, cancelled the April 3 release date for its new romantic comedy “The Lovebirds,” and sold the US streaming rights to Netflix instead, The Information reports. Amazon executives gave at least one studio executive a list of the unreleased movies it wanted, based on how many viewers it estimated those movies would draw.

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