NBCUniversal’s controversial decision to air the NFL playoff game between Kansas City and Miami exclusively on the streaming service produced record signups for the streaming service according to a new study from Antenna.
NBCUniversal and the NFL have previously said that the January 13 matchup between Kansas City and Miami was the biggest live-streamed event in U.S. history and that it drove internet usage in a single day in the U.S. to a new record.
Now Antenna is reporting that it was the single biggest subscriber acquisition moment ever measured by Antenna. Antenna will officially report January 2024 data in mid-February, but based on their preliminary analysis, Antenna estimated in a blog post that a total of 2.8 million sign-ups to Peacock occurred over NFL Wild Card Game weekend.
Using a comparable three-day window, Peacock’s Wild Card Weekend also drove more sign-ups than past Super Bowls that were available on SVOD platforms, albeit non-exclusively.
Other previous highs included the 2022 FIFA World Cup Black Friday promotion, which garnered 1.5 million signups and Super Bowl LVI (1.1 million).
The blog post noted that while the launch of Disney+ in 2019 saw more than 2.5 million sign-ups in a single day, no other singular programming event has resulted in this many sign-ups to a service in a three-day window.
How that will translate into sub retention remains an open question, though the Antenna researchers noted that “Antenna data has shown that certain sports-motivated subscribers can be more loyal than the average subscriber.”
More data and information on the methodology and definitions of core metrics is available at http://www.antenna.live/methodology.
