NBC Sports President comments on WWE-Peacock.
WWE content on Peacock became a talking point during the newest episode of The Main Event with Andrew Marchand. Joining him on the show was NBC Sports President Rick Cordella.
Cordella spoke about bringing the WWE on board and the amount of subscribers that came with the addition of their content folder. Cordella revealed that originally, Peacock was not going to feature sports. They had planned to go the Netflix/Hulu route.
We kind of backed into it (having sports on Peacock). I’m not sure if I’ve ever told this story but Peacock wasn’t meant to have sports initially. We were really trying to be what Netflix was or what Hulu was which was an entertainment, sort of S.V.O.D. (subscription video on demand) and we were trying to come up with ideas for our launch which (was) July 15th, 2020 and because of COVID, the Premier League season was pushed back and they were playing games in the summer and I remember going to Peter Bevacqua, who is my former boss here at NBC Sports and saying, ‘Hey, what do you think about pulling some Premier League games out of NBC Sports Gold?’ Which was our sports-specific S.V.O.D. service and put them onto Peacock for our launch, and I think we had a Liverpool game that was available and so, he was open to it. We went to the Premier League guys and they were fantastic partners as always. They were open to it and next thing you know, we have Premier League on our launch day and sure enough, what drove the most subs on that launch day was Premier League, and so we’re like, ‘Well what if we continue doing Premier League for the remainder of the season?’ And so again, we had it non-exclusively on Peacock. It was still on NBC Sports Gold and it continued to sort of drive subs to the door. We then said, ‘Let’s take NBC Sports Gold.’ We had Tour de France and other sport of smaller sports, bring that over to Peacock and every time we ran a live event on Peacock, we saw that it drove subs and not only did subs come in, but they stayed and they watch entertainment offerings and it kind of goes back to the days of broadcast TV and Sunday Night Football promoting Monday night content, you know, on the entertainment side of things and so that model worked and I’d say from there, we added WWE Network and that was a big one internally. How will that work? And we give a lot of credit to Nick Khan and the WWE team over there for having their faith in Peacock which is a very nascent service at the time. But we brought that product in and that content and those fans came…
The WWE on Peacock rights are up in March 2026. WWE President Nick Khan spoke about that and to read his comments, click here.
If the quote in this article is used, please credit The Main Event with Andrew Marchand with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcription.
