Peacock’s editorial team has adjusted and reorganized video content on the fly. Viewers and reviewers have been buzzing about Snoop Dogg’s segments, so the team set up a scrollable playlist of Snoop clips. Users have been looking for videos of the medal ceremonies, so now there’s a collection of those, too.
Some of the new formats are fundamentally different ways to “watch TV.” With Multiview, for instance, the Olympics wash over you—less like a show, more like a state of being. Campbell says about half of Multiview users click into a specific sport, so they’re using the split-screen as a “discovery tool,” while the other half stay in the control room-style experience.
Control is the operative word; we’re all growing increasingly comfortable with multiple screens and data sources in our faces at all times. YouTube TV, which has been offering a make-your-own multiview function since last year, has been promoting preset Olympics versions this summer. DirecTV has its own version, too. People are growing more accustomed to “using more than one screen at one time,” Campbell says.
NBC has around 20 actual control rooms operating at any given time between Paris, New York and NBC Sports headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut. For Gold Zone, a feast for the eyes, producers in Stamford pick 16 live feeds to monitor at a time, then the directors whip around from event to event, hoping to catch every medal contest.
Gold Zone usage more than doubled in the first few days of the games, Campbell says. Multiview has also been used by millions of subscribers. Of course, fans always want more: On Sunday a woman tweeted to @Peacock, asking about the LA Olympics in 2028: “can we make a custom multi view where you can choose the four things you watch?” (NBC won’t commit to that, but I bet it is in the works already.)
As I spoke with Solomon, I realized that I had not watched a single minute of NBC’s traditional prime time TV coverage. And she’s okay 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; on television platforms; streaming on Peacock. And that’s why we’ve given them all 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 a success.”
Because NBC has your attention and thus so do the company’s advertisers. The medium previously known as television is becoming more and more like a never-ending Instagram scroll. But some moments (like Team USA’s dominance in Paris) are still big enough to capture almost everyone’s fragmented attention. “In the end,” Solomon says, “we’re all watching the same team.”