Peacock Makes Free TV Hard to Pass Up

Peacock is a tale of tiers — Peacock, Peacock Premium and Peacock Premium Plus.

If the streamer is on your radar because it became the exclusive streaming home of The Office on January 1, you’re in luck that the first two seasons are free and ad-supported. Watching Kevin drop a vat of chili (Season 5’s “Casual Friday”), Jim and Pam’s wedding (Season 6’s “Niagara”), and lots of extras and extended episodes, though, will require a $5-a-month upgrade to Peacock Premium.

The Peacock Premium tier is more than just The Office, though. It also includes Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Superstore, Everybody Loves Raymond, the Saved by the Bell revival, the Real Housewives catalog, the Kardashian expanded universe, British imports, a growing roster of DreamWorks kids’ shows, next-day episodes of most NBC shows, Premier League soccer, and many Spanish-language titles.) The $10 Premium Plus tier is all of that and ad-free.

But enough about Peacock Premium; let’s talk about free, ad-supported Peacock. I get the premium upgrade for free as a Comcast internet subscriber, so it had not been easy for me to tell which titles were free and which were premium until I signed up for a new account. For the last month, I’ve been watching a lot of free, ad-supported Peacock.

Short version: With its great catalog titles, surprisingly tolerable ad loads, news and sports programming, well-executed live channels, and intuitive interface, Peacock is a best-in-class free streamer. It’s even better with the $5-a-month premium tier, but Peacock should be on your living-room TV either way.

The Good Stuff Is Mostly Free

Free, ad-supported streamers IMDb TV, Roku Channel, Pluto TV, and Tubi have grown their audiences considerably the last few years by investing in higher-profile film and TV titles and keeping their ad loads — the number of advertising minutes per hour — lower than what you see on traditional cable.

Peacock, which launched in mid-2020, has a better and more permanent TV catalog and the same tolerable ad loads as other free streamers. NBCUniversal’s ownership of Peacock gives the service two key advantages:

• NBCUniversal has committed many of its best-known TV titles — Saturday Night Live, Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock, Frasier, Chicago Fire, Chicago P.D., Chicago Med, Friday Night Lights, Parenthood, Heroes, New Amsterdam, Battlestar Galactica, Monk, Psych, Suits, Below Deck, Southern Charm — to free Peacock. That’s a great lineup, and those are just the highlights.
• Peacock licenses Yellowstone, Downton Abbey, Cheers, etc., from outside studios, but parent company NBCUniversal owns the vast majority of TV titles available on the service and plans to keep them on the service for the foreseeable future. That matters when you’re midway through Season 2 of Chicago Fire and have 150 more episodes to stream.

Peacock also has current-season episodes of nearly every NBC series — including Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, The Blacklist, The Voice and Weakest Link — available next-day for Peacock Premium and a week later for free Peacock.

A Great News Destination

I’m a news junkie with no shortage of places to get it, so the amount of time I spend watching news on Peacock is considerably more than I expected it to be. That’s partly because there’s so much news and my getting attached to Peacock’s The Mehdi Hasan Show and Zerlina, but I suspect it’s also partly because Peacock is such a centralized, user-friendly place for news coverage.

Mehdi Hasan and Zerlina Maxwell are regular contributors and guest hosts on MSNBC, and their Peacock shows have the same production values, guests and tone as MSNBC shows. Peacock makes Mehdi Hasan and Zerlina easy to find by rotating them with the syndicated The Majority Report with Sam Seder in hour-long blocks on a channel called The Choice and making them available on demand.

Peacock is noncommittal on adding additional shows to The Choice, but it’s not hard to imagine more integration with MSNBC and CNBC over time. Peacock also has several other live news channels: NBC News Now (breaking news), NBC Sports (weekday sports talk), Today All Day (Today show highlights), Sky News (U.K. news channel), and CNBC Ka-Ching and CNBC Make It (CNBC repeats).

Recent episodes of Meet the Press with Chuck Todd, NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, Sunday Today with Willie Geist are available in Peacock’s News tab along with recent clips from MSNBC and CNBC, regular features like Explainers and In-Depth Interviews, and topical collections like Battling COVID-19 and Around the World.

Peacock Stands Alone — on Purpose

Like Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ and HBO Max, Peacock is a standalone service on a standalone app. It’s not a channel you add to your Apple TV or Amazon account like Starz or AMC+ that becomes part of the bigger streamer. Peacock is the bigger streamer. (Mostly. Peacock is still not available on Amazon Fire TV or Samsung.)

“Our ambition with Peacock is to really position ourselves as the premium ad-supported aggregation streaming service,” Peacock chief Matt Strauss said in a interview with MediaPlay News. “We didn’t call ourselves NBC+. We didn’t call ourselves that for a reason — because we wanted to position ourselves as an aggregator that can go beyond the boundaries of our catalog and our content.”

Maybe, but what’s in the NBCUniversal boundaries — NBC News, NBC Sports, the NBC comedies, the Bravo catalog, Jurassic Park, the Minions, Universal Studios — can take Peacock pretty far. Peacock’s success attracting and keeping viewers with entertainment, news, sports and children’s content will affirm WarnerMedia, Disney, Apple and Amazon’s plans to make their streamers into and part of 21st-century lifestyle brands.

Peacock wants to be your evening news, your movie night, your sitcom binge watch, and your Summer Olympics. Peacock would love to upsell you to $5-a-month premium or even $10-a-month ad-free premium for The Office or Premier League soccer or some future Jurassic Park or Fast and Furious limited series, but it mainly wants you to download the app and start watching.

There’s a lot to watch, it will get better as it goes, and — as the launch campaign said — it’s free as a bird.

Scott Porch writes about the TV business for Decider. He is a contributing writer for The Daily Beast and a podcast producer for Starburns Audio. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.