Peacock’s editorial team has been tweaking and reorganizing video content on the fly. Viewers and critics have been raving about Snoop Dogg’s segments, so the team created a scrollable playlist of Snoop clips. Users have been searching for videos from the medal ceremonies, so now there’s a collection of those, too.
Some of the new formats are fundamentally different ways of “watching TV.” With Multiview, for example, the Olympics wash over you, less as a spectacle, more as a state of being. Campbell says about half of Multiview users click on a specific sport, so they use the split screen as a “discovery tool,” while the other half stay in the control room experience.
Control is the key word; we’re increasingly comfortable with multiple screens and data sources in front of our faces at all times. YouTube TV, which has offered a create-your-own-screen multi-viewing feature since last year, has been promoting preset versions of the Olympics this summer. DirecTV has its own version, too. People are increasingly getting used to “using more than one screen at a time,” Campbell says.
NBC has about 20 current Control rooms operate around the clock between Paris, New York and NBC Sports headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut. For the eye-watering Gold Zone, Stamford producers select 16 live feeds to monitor at once, then directors shuttle from event to event in hopes of capturing all the medal contests.
According to Campbell, Gold Zone usage more than doubled in the first few days of the games. Millions of subscribers have also used Multiview. Of course, fans always want more: On Sunday, a woman tweeted at @Peacock and asked about the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics: “Can we do a custom multiview where you can pick the four things you want to watch?” (NBC isn’t committing to doing so, but I’m betting it’s already in the works.)
While speaking with Solomon, I realized she hadn’t watched a single minute of NBC’s traditional primetime television coverage. And she’s fine with that! When I asked her to define success in 2024 from NBC’s perspective, she said, “Success is the audience engaging with the Olympics on social media, on TV platforms and streaming on Peacock. And that’s why we’ve given everyone different flavors of the Olympics. Find what satisfies you, and as long as you’re with us in some form on some platform, it’s going to be a success.”
Because NBC has your attention, and therefore, so do the company’s advertisers. The medium once known as television is increasingly becoming like an endless Instagram scroll. But some moments (like Team USA’s dominance in Paris) are still important enough to capture nearly everyone’s fragmented attention. “In the end,” Solomon says, “we’re all watching the same team.”