YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Strauss

lines on the record: 79
first: 2024-09-30
most recent: 2024-09-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Networks and payTV can drive audience to streaming and awareness for streaming and vice versa streaming can drive people back to linear. Another example of this would be a show like Yellowstone. Not everybody maybe is aware, but Yellowstone, we have the exclusive rights to stream Yellowstone on Peacock. When we licensed Yellowstone, it was not the number one show in television, which is part of the reason why we got the rights to it, because we took a bet that we thought it was a really good show. But that show was on Paramount Network, which is a cable network on various tiers of cable. It's not even a basic cable network. What happened there, I think, fairly predictably, because it is an excellent show, is that people were finding it on streaming because we were the exclusive home for it. They were then catching up as the show progressed in its seasons. And then they were tuning back into watch.”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That streaming is a way for us to kind of drive more growth and offset that decline and eventually become the broader growth engine for the company. But as I mentioned before, I think sometimes it's interpreted that legacy networks are somehow dinosaurs and that's not really where people are spending a lot of time. I see it very, very differently. I see it as a strength. You know, when you have a broadcast network and you could do something like the Olympics and you're averaging over 30 million viewers a day, that actually becomes a huge promotional vehicle for you to also drive awareness and audience for your streaming service. When you have networks like Bravo with really deep fandoms and you can tap into that fandom on a streaming service by making some of that content available to cord cutters, it creates a little bit of an infinity loop where linear”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well remember though the decline in pay TV isn't, I mean, this may sound crude, it's not just because older people are passing away. I mean, some of it is people at all ages are making decisions where they might feel like it's more valuable, where they want to just cup the cord, so to speak, and get streaming services. And you could be at any age to do that. But to answer your more broad question. Yes. I mean, that is essentially the strategy, which is why Peacock exists within NBC Universal, is as we see the pay TV business still being a very good business, it's a very profitable business for our company. And we've built really strong brands in the PTV ecosystem”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Describe the different segments of the audience, right? There are some people who still have traditional MVPD subscriptions and they're just, they've got a satellite box or a cable box or whatever. And there's other people who are watching TikTok all day. I would segment them differently. I think you've got older customers and younger customers and the younger customers will almost certainly never sign up for a traditional multi-channel cable bundle type thing, right? When you think about that split, that has a timeline on it, right? You're going to lose older customers at some rate and hopefully gain younger customers at a faster rate. Are those lines going to sync up on time? Do you see the growth in the younger customer offsetting the decline in the older customer? Because what's happened lately is...”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sprinter's pace, you know, because obviously the market's moving very quickly But we're fortunate to be part of a much broader diversified company at Comcast with a senior management team that believes in our vision, in our strategy. And that's allowed us to not do things like chase low value subs or do wholesale bundling deals without the right economic relationships. And I think it's positioned us in a really, really good way going forward because we don't feel like we have to do things artificially just to kind of grow our sub base like we want to grow subs at the right ARPU revenue per subscriber, at the right level of engagement and build a subscriber base in the right way. And that's essentially what we've been doing. And we haven't wavered from that strategy or that vision from the beginning.”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'm describing price value and there's a high value on sports. And that's obviously manifesting itself when you just look at sports rights and the price that sports rights are going for in the market. And so essentially, yes, that, you know, I mean, yes to your question that we see ourselves. I mean, if you look at peacock just as an example, we have more live sports than any other streaming service. You know, when you look at the NFL, the Premier League, Big Ten, the Olympics, obviously the NBA that's coming to Peacock later next year. And over the course of a year, we have like some live sports, 300 of 365 days. And so we didn't get there by accident. We got there through real intention. Like we've had a very consistent strategy and vision from the beginning. And I think what you're just seeing is us executing against that strategy. We would say internally like, look, this is not a sprint. It's a marathon.”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Equally important, if not more important, is that you get the right wholesale economics around how you're positioning that bundle. And so we feel like we're in a really good position based on the trajectory that we're on. But if the market does move more towards bundling, we also feel like we're well positioned to be included in that kind of packaging. But I don't think it's going to take away from direct to consumer. I just think for us it's going to continue to augment the subscriber base that we currently have.”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Answer your question though, like as the market moves more and more towards bundling, I do see that becoming an increasingly larger portion of our subscriber base. And again, taking the history lesson from what we know about bundling, the one thing that arguably has always held the bundle together has been sports. And sports coming from that side of the business, if you remember, we launched Peacock. It was supposed to be around the Tokyo Olympics. And so live sports was always fundamental to our strategy. And we've been aggregating live sports and sports rights fairly consistently since we've launched Peacock with real purpose and intention, knowing that not only is sports going to be a driver of acquisition, which is proven to be true for us, but that sports is going to be an important component that if the market does move to bundling, that not only will we solidify our place in that bundle, but”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the market. And so the vast majority of people who signed up for Peacock signed up directly, with the exception of Comcast. We did do a bundling deal with Comcast and they currently do wholesale Peacock with certain of their packages like high-end gig broadband subscribers, but the overwhelming majority of our sub base is direct to consumer.”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's why when we launched Peacock, we wanted to have both linear networks. We launched with dozens of linear channels. We launched with a library of 80,000 hours. We've grown the library to over 80,000 hours of programming. And we were also very intentional about it being ad supported because a dual revenue stream from our point of view was better than a single revenue stream. And this is also core competency for what we do at MVC with having a very strong ad sales team and deep relationships with different advertisers. And we went to market with five minutes of ads per hour, which again was a very controversial thing to do at the time. But that's given us an advantage because it's also allowed us to focus on how do we innovate on the advertising beyond 15 and 30 second spots because it's been core to our DNA from the beginning. And the only reason I'm giving you all this context is that when we built the service with that intent, it really was different.”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Scripted dramas and movies and on demand, even though that is a piece of the programming strategy. But it was also about live sports and live news and unscripted programming and multicultural programming. And again, playing to the strengths of what we do as a company, as a broadcast company, which was to target a broad household demographic. And the strategy there was that if we anchored ourselves in that place, then we're not directly competing with other streamers. We're more complementary. It was about completeness and in some ways being like the best of cable TV for a relatively affordable price. And we also believed that the future was not just going to be on demand, even though on demand is a core piece of the way we consume television. But that linear and live, which a lot of people four years ago were saying was dead, like that was just nonsense.”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Might be a little bit unique. Because we actually do not have that much bundling. The majority of our subscriber base is direct to consumer. And we have been very disciplined in how we've tried to grow the subscriber base. Again, if you just go back a couple of years, Peacock launched in 2020. And at the time, the market was really focused on on-demand scripted dramas, binge viewing, and most ad-free. Most services were chasing that segment of the market. And we came to a market late, if we're being honest about it. But one of the benefits of coming to a market late is you could assess the white space and like where you see opportunity. And so we believe the opportunity for us was to position Peacock in the premium ad supported space and not just kind of focus on premiums.”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The rates are continuing to go up. In some cases, you may be asking yourself, like, wait, I might be paying more and possibly getting less than what I got when I subscribed to cable. And I think that these are the ingredients in the marketplace that is driving the market to bundling. And I had talked about this five years ago, that we're likely going to see an explosion of streaming and direct-to-consumer only to then find it almost reaggregate itself under a new bundle. And I think there's obviously a lot of evidence over the last two years where that's exactly what's been happening. So again, in many ways, like it doesn't change the fact that you're going to still have people who subscribe to cable or streaming or both. But I think that direct-to-consumer is going to be a very important component. But I think increasingly direct to consumer and direct to consumer is part of a bundling construct.”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Seen that as an industry over the past 18 to 24 months where streaming services have continued to take their rates up in an effort to drive more profitability. By the way, we're not excluded from that. I mean, we took a price increase over the summer. And so I think that that, though, was a very predictable outcome. The other predictable outcome from my point of view is what I said earlier, which is people watch more video than they really know. If you look at the Nielsen numbers, the amount of time that people spend watching video has been fairly consistent over the past decade. And so if you cut the cord and you sign up for a streaming service, you're unlikely to get your video calories as a consumer from one service. And so what happens is you subscribe to two, three, and now the average consumer is subscribing to four or five services. And so you take these two things together where I'm subscribing now to four or five services.”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“TV viewing and TV household viewing. But yes, I mean, direct to consumer is where we're really projecting the growth to come from. And certainly what's interesting about what you're putting your finger on is I actually think that there's a lot of signs of what I've learned in the cable business that I see happening in the direct-to-consumer business that in some ways it's going to be, I think, back to the future. And what I mean by that is that people who maybe did cut the cord, part of the rationale, I believe was because they thought they were going to save money by going and just getting some streaming services. And to a certain extent, that was true for some period of time. But it was very predictable that the cost of content hasn't gone down, the cost of sports rights hasn't gone down. It was inevitable that prices of streaming services were going to have to increase.”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you kind of study the pay TV ecosystem and kind of the trajectory of pay TV, I think it's consistently been declining year over year. And I don't think anybody really knows what point does it kind of start to flatten out, but I do believe that there's always going to be a fairly large group of people who are willing to pay a premium for cable for all the reasons that I said before. And so I think that's still going to be a very, very large part.”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The last time I was a Comcast customer was 15 years ago, I lived in Chicago, and everyone I knew was a Comcast customer. That was the choice in my building and most of the neighborhoods that my friends lived in. And then we all also got internet from Comcast because of what you're describing, the bundle. There was not another thing. It was just the easiest next thing to do. When you describe direct to consumer, that's another distribution method, right? You're going literally directly to consumer and charging them money and then giving them services directly and you manage the customer relationship. Is that the part that's going to grow versus the experience I had when I was a Comcast customer and I would watch NBC 5 in Chicago, but Comcast owned the relationship with me?”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a media company, you want to cast a broad enough net where you're providing a value proposition for one segment, which is like the content carnivore. But at the same time offering the optionality and in some cases with direct to consumer. But in many cases, there's an overlap between the two. And so when you look at it as a portfolio, which is really how we manage the business in MVC, it's not direct to consumer sits outside of the broadcast and the cable networks. It's actually all one group. And we manage it as a portfolio. And there's examples where that comes to life, like the Olympics. But I think that we're kind of looking at it in totality and that it's about giving customers choice and options. And that's how we see ourselves growing. And so if PayTV declines and cord cutting grows, we still want to service the customers who have payTV, but at the same time, we recognize that the”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bundling has a lot of virtue because the more you take, the better the price. And so people who subscribe to cable and satellite today, it's not that they're not aware of other choices. They're paying, in some cases, for that convenience and that reliability. They also tend to over-index in subscribing to streaming services. And so it's not one or the other. In many cases, you're seeing that customer buying both. And so that's one part of the market. You have another part of the market, which might be more price sensitive, maybe does not consume as much video in some cases. You know, they might watch video, but they might be spending more time on social media or video gaming or how else they're occupying their time. And they like the flexibility of being able to subscribe to a subset of services. And in many ways, that's what direct-to-consumer is offering. And so there is a Venn diagram, though, here where”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No question that the cable business is a good business. It continues to be a good business. I think to answer the question, you almost need to look at it through the lens of the consumer. What I've learned is there really are different cohorts of how people consume video, how they subscribe to video. So for example, the cable customer tends to watch a lot of TV. The average consumer watches about five hours a day. If you subscribe to cable, typically watch that much, if not more. And there's a lot of benefit of having cable because, as I mentioned, if you have the X1 platform, there's a simplicity of just having all the choices in one place. It works with like 99.99% reliability. And in many cases, people are also subscribing to the bundle. So they're getting video, but then they're also getting internet and in some cases they're getting their wireless. And, you know, the bundling, even though people tend to say they like a la carte.”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't have as much power over the suppliers because the suppliers can get to consumers in lots of different ways. That's the transition that you're mentioning. And it has really disrupted the whole industry. How do you see Peacock fitting into this at the end? Is it going to be as good of a business as the cable business was once upon a time? Because it feels like everyone is searching for a business that good.”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're on Decoder, so I'm absolutely going to ask you about how all of that is structured and how all of those individual P&Ls fight for resources. But I want to just take one step back and focus on the transition you mentioned from Comcast to NBC to direct to consumer. Broadly, in the TV world, we're going from a place where big cable companies like Comcast or Spectrum or whatever had big regional physical infrastructure monopolies, right? You had these natural monopolies because you had wires in the ground going to everyone's houses. You were the distributor. The video providers would come to you and you would resell the services. And that was a pretty good business for everyone. Now we're at a place where there's multiple ways to get programming over the internet, whether it's wireless, whether it's fiber in the ground, whether it's still the cable network, whether it's other forms of broadband with Starlink. And the distributors.”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their networks in almost every country around the world. And so what we recognized was that if we could aggregate all of these businesses under one portfolio, it actually could give us even more economies of scale. And that's what we started to do. And so the umbrella of direct-to-consumer peacock is certainly a big piece of it. But all these other businesses, the global businesses and these other digital businesses now sit under this D2C umbrella. They each have their own individual P&Ls, but in the aggregate, they reach 100 million users. They generate billions of dollars of revenue. And they also are available in over 70 countries around the world. And so I think that that is the portfolio that I'm now managing. And so how we then leverage that portfolio is something that I've been trying to build out over the last few years around, again, trying to build one product team, one technology team, one decision.”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that when you're trying to build something new, it's common to almost incubate it. You kind of create resources, you put a little bit of a fence around it because you don't want the day-to-day activity necessarily interfering with the ambition of trying to build a new business. And Peacock was the same inside of NBC. But what I realized early on was that there's lots of other businesses within NBC that actually are very complementary and can help get us more scale, can help de-risk the execution and the ambition we had with Peacock, for example, NBC Owens Fandango, which is one of the largest ticketing companies. They own voodoo, which is now called Fandango at Home, which has a catalog of 250,000 titles for digital purchase and rental. They own Ron Tomatoes. Which is certainly known for movie and TV reviews. They also, everyone's familiar with NBC and a lot of the cable networks that we have in the United States. But NBC distributes”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All these on demand choices, and X1 became the platform where we did that. And it really was ahead of its time because it aggregated live and on demand and DVR and even apps and made them all really seamless for consumers, including the ability to navigate them with your voice, with the voice remote, which was before even Siri and Alexa, like we were experimenting with voice. And I think as my career there kind of grew and I took on more of the role of overseeing the residential services at Comcast, which included video and broadband and phone. I got a call one day to come to NBC, which obviously is a subsidiary of Comcast. And I got a call from Steve Burke, who at the time was the CEO. You know, he had asked if I would come there to help them build a streaming service and take it to market. And I got that call on a Thursday. And Monday, I showed up in New York City with my suitcase and I was ready to go.”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's a little bit broader than that, you know, maybe just to give you a little bit of background. I actually had just celebrated my 20-year anniversary at Comcast, and so I've been at the company for quite a long time. When I came to Comcast, I actually came there as cable was transitioning from analog to digital. And it gave way to the two-way connectivity that ultimately built things like on-demand. And so on-demand technology is something I've been very passionate about my entire career. and was really focused on how I build that out for Comcast and spent quite a number of years doing that. And then we ultimately launched the X1 platform, which was Comcast's IP settl box because we realized that the future was on demand. That was going to give people instant gratification. And we needed a platform to allow people ultimately control that they could navigate.”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“NFL games and 4K HDR, whenever I want. You're on the hook now, Matt. Okay, Matt Strauss, head of direct to consumer at NBC Universal. Here we go. Matt Strauss, you are the chairman of Director Consumer at NBC Universal. Welcome to Dakot”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“which peacock and other services at Comcast run on. And I wanted to know if that big tech investment is generating the kind of economies of scale that really pay off over time. Stuff that tech companies think about all the time, but which media companies have had to learn. And one thing that I really wanted to talk to Matt about was how Peacock handled the Olympics this year. It really felt like things clicked for that platform and Peacock in Paris over the summer. And the idea that all of the coverage from the Olympics could be served up in multiple different formats on demand and live really came together. It turns out that a lot of these ideas have been brewing inside of NBC for a long time, for a decade or more in some cases. And you'll hear Matt describe how some early efforts didn't really go so well. There's a lot going on in this one. Tech, media, sports, culture, all at once. It's quite a ride. Our usual disclosure before we start, NBCU is an investor in the Virgil's parent company of Oxmedia, but they have no control over our newsroom, and I remain free to demand anything.”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Lai Patel, editor in chief of the Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Matt Strauss, who is chairman of Direct to Consumer at NBC Universal. That's a fancy title. It means he's in charge of Peacock and all of NBC Universal's other consumer products. That includes everything from Fandango and its Fandango at Home video service, which used to be Voodoo, to rotten tomatoes, to the core platforms that powers the now TV service run by Sky in Europe. That's a lot, and all of that is under the overall ownership of Comcast, which is in the middle of its own massive transition as the traditional cable TV business fades away. Matt actually spent almost two decades at Comcast proper, working on its cable products before switching over to NBCU. And I was really interested in his view on how the economics of the TV business will shake out as almost everyone moves over to streaming. Matt also oversees what's called the global streaming platform.”
2024-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · NBCU's streaming chief isn't worried about you canceling cable · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT