Disney (DIS) who entered the smoldering wars last year didn’t cause panic in the heart of the Netflix co-founder, and now that NBCUniversal’s streaming service Peacock is officially launched, it’s déjà vu again for the man who first directed the leader of transmission.
Even as Peacock surpasses the number of major players in the broadcast space over 10, Netflix’s first CEO Marc Randolph told Yahoo Finance that Netflix (NFLX) will remain steadfast on its path to continue to outperform the competition.
Interestingly, Peacock launched this week with a slightly different option for customers by offering a free tier with advertising and a paid subscription option. Despite that, Randolph says it won’t be enough to entice Netflix to do the same, nor will it be enough to shake things up.
“If they had been first or second, they could have designed a slightly different product,” he said in a new interview with YFi PM of Yahoo Finance. “When you’re the tenth boy, you have to shake the playbook, and certainly [the COVID-19 pandemic] it has not helped their situation. “
As Randolph knows well from his days building Netflix when he was still shipping DVDs, sometimes releases don’t necessarily go as planned. Despite the fact that more Americans stream content in the pandemic home environment, Peacock is not pitching with the content it hoped for. Primarily, NBC’s parent company Comcast has struggled to postpone the Tokyo Olympics due to the pandemic, which limited the firepower of exclusive deals that were allegedly fueling the intrigue of the media giant’s broadcast platform. .
Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph now spends most of his time training startups and founders. (Photo by George Pimentel / Getty Images for Audi)
“They wanted to use the Olympics as this important thing that would have helped them really boost notoriety and content, but of course not the Olympics,” said Randolph. “They wanted to come out, of course, with some great new and eye-catching content and, with the exception of Brave New World, there may not be much news.”
That said, Randolph says there is still a chance that Peacock could become a worthwhile competitor given NBC’s content and size umbrella. Next year he will retire “The Office” from Netflix, which has been one of the series most broadcast on the platform. Beyond that, there’s always the appeal of packaging sports content, something other streaming options don’t have.
Paraphrasing former United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Randolph classified the Peacock launch as a perfect example of a streaming service that enters broadcast wars with the features it has, not the features it wanted.
“They don’t have mobile downloads, they don’t have 4K [steaming quality] but they are going to have these things. I think it will take a while, ”said Randolph. “I don’t think it will be until next year when we see Peacock come to prominence. I think it’s starting with its wings a little bit trimmed. “
