Why Peacock is making a huge bet on YouTube

Today, I’m talking with Matt Strauss, who is now chairman of the NBCUniversal Media Group. This is Matt’s second time joining me on the show, and there’s been a whole lot of organizational and structural change at NBCU since the last time he and I spoke just two years ago — pure Decoder bait. First, about a month after Matt was on the show, Comcast spun off most of the NBCU cable channels into something called Versant. That’s when Matt’s title changed from heading up just the direct-to-consumer offering — meaning Peacock, plus some other streaming services — to heading up the whole thing, across all distribution. And now, Comcast is spinning off the NBCU business entirely into a whole new standalone company. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. That’s a lot to have going on all at once! And meanwhile, it’s only just this year that Peacock became an actual profitable business at all — and it’s still pretty far away from being anything like the juggernaut that Netflix is. But what NBCU has, and what Peacock has, that the rest of the streaming industry is still trying to wrap its head around, is live sports. Sports are huge. They held up the cable industry for years, they held up broadcast, and now they’re the big thing that could make streaming a winner for NBC. One thing before we start: You’ll hear me ask Matt about the red company and the blue company. That’s just my way of getting Matt to talk about Netflix and Skydance, the company that now owns both Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery. I think he did a good job playing along. Before we get going, do me a favor and subscribe to Decoder on YouTube, where we put out new episodes every Monday and Thursday. Okay: Matt Strauss, chairman of the NBCU Media Group. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Matt Strauss, you are the chairman of the NBCUniversal Media Group. Welcome back to Decoder. Thank you so much, Nilay. It’s great to be back. I am very excited to talk to you. There’s a lot going on in the media. It is a tumultuous time in Hollywood. I have to tell the audience that you and I are speaking minutes after Anthropic filed its S-1, and all of humanity is going to be turned into AI. Who knows what entertainment we’ll be watching in the future? There’s a lot going on. Let’s start at the very beginning of this. You have a new job since last time you were on the show. Last time, you were the head of Direct-to-Consumer — you were basically the head of Peacock and the other apps inside the family. Now you’re the chairman of NBCUniversal Media Group. What’s the new job? What does that mean? NBCUniversal Media Group is comprised of certain services within NBC. It’s the broadcast network, it’s Bravo, it’s Peacock, it’s NBC Sports. We also have NBC News and Telemundo. One of the things that we recognized, especially when we spun off some of our cable assets last year into Versant, was that the assets we had truly worked better together. NBC has been like a megaphone. Given the reach of NBC, it’s been incredibly strategic in growing Peacock, which is a bit ironic because I think so many people believed that broadcasting was a bit of a relic of the past in this digital world, but it’s actually proven to be the opposite. As things have gotten more fragmented, having a broadcast network is actually a superpower because we’re continuing to see ratings growth. That has been really helpful as we’ve been building out Peacock. But actually, Peacock was also finding new audiences, like cord cutters or people who maybe didn’t grow up watching NBC or some of our cable networks. So, Peacock’s also been really strategic in reaching and driving people back to NBC and Bravo. So, I think that flywheel is where we recognized that we needed to start operating differently. I’ve been a huge advocate of what I like to call “centers of excellence” in how I like to structure the business, which is, content first and platform second. How do we get maximum reach, maximum engagement? That really required us thinking differently about how we were running the business. Essentially, instead of having a programming group within broadcast and a programming group within streaming, we just collapsed the business. Now you’ve got one programming team, one marketing team, one product and technology team, one decision sciences and research team, and one advertising team. They’re all incentivized around continuing to grow the portfolio, get that maximum reach, maximum engagement, and drive top-line revenue. I think that structure, which we put in place about 18 months ago, is contributing to a lot of the success that we’re seeing now. Even if you look at 2026, NBC is the number one network in total viewers. We had an unbelievable early part of the year with “Legendary February,” which you might remember. That’s when we had the Super Bowl,