NBCU gives behind-the-scenes look at NBA, Peacock strategy
Los Angeles — The NBA’s new season tipped off with a bang, delivering its highest opening week viewership in 15 years.
Nearly 37 million U.S. viewers tuned in across NBC/Peacock, Amazon Prime Video and ESPN — peaking at 7.1 million viewers during the overtime thriller between the Houston Rockets and Oklahoma City Thunder.
This surge in opening weekend viewership is no accident. It’s the result of a redefined media strategy that expands the NBA’s footprint across both traditional and digital platforms. NBCUniversal returned to NBA broadcasting for the first time since 2002. Meanwhile, Amazon made history by streaming the league’s first game exclusively on a streaming service. NBCU followed a few days later, airing a doubleheader exclusively on Peacock, signaling a new era in how live sports are delivered and consumed.
NBCU leaned into nostalgia — reviving RoundBall Rock, pregame player intros and Bob Costas monologues. But the goal wasn’t just sentimentality. It was a strategic move to reintroduce the NBA to a broader, more digitally engaged audience.
“The ecosystem isn’t the same as it was when the NBA was last on NBC,” Matthew Gottlieb, senior vice president of insights and measurement, said during a panel at the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) conference. “We are looking at this through three main lenses: consumption, engagement and impact.”
The impact is already measurable. In fact, data from EDO shows that audiences watching NBA games on NBC were 20% more likely to search for advertisers within five minutes of seeing the ad run compared to the 2024 NBA season average.
This all ties into NBCU’s broader philosophy: prioritizing the full marketing funnel over traditional metrics like reach and brand lift. NBC may have the NBA for the first time since 2002, but its strategy isn’t stuck in the early 2000s.
Live sports’ upfronts crown
There’s no question the NBA and live sports were the crown jewel of not only NBCU’s upfront offering, but a centerpiece for every major broadcaster.
Disney raked in nearly $4 billion in live sports upfront commitments, while NBCU reported its biggest upfront ever, with a 45% increase in live sports volume.
Kelly Metz, chief investment officer at Spark Foundry, noted during the panel that “prices have skyrocketed this year for live sports,” because of the Winter Olympics and World Cup coming next year, alongside major pro sports like the NBA.
“There will be a reckoning in next year’s upfront that I’m not looking forward to, but it will happen,” Metz said.
Metz later softened that statement, clarifying that the reduced availability of high-profile sports inventory in the next upfront cycle will change the calculus for media buyers.
Turning sports fans into Love Island fans
One way NBCU is tackling this is by using its audience data to guide viewers from sports into other genres. The goal is to keep NBA fans engaged with Peacock beyond game nights. Research shows that Peacock users’ churn rates are significantly lower if they sign up for sports but also watch non-sports content.
For instance, viewers of Cleveland Cavaliers games on Peacock are 2.4 times more likely to watch Black-led character dramas, and they over-index among males 65 to 74 years old, true crime fans, and competition reality show viewers.
Meanwhile, there are more women 18 to 34 years old watching Oklahoma City Thunder games, and those viewers are 4.4 times more likely to watch prestige niche sports and 1.3 more times likely to enjoy witty, satirical shows.
“It’s a very surgical approach, a very data-driven approach, but we think increasingly important to cater to the taste of these individual fans,” Dave Kaplan, executive vice president of content analytics at NBCUniversal, said during his CIMM presentation.
Snoop Dogg, the Olympics and The Voice
The NBA isn’t the only sports springboard, though. NBCU had success funneling Olympics viewers into entertainment content — particularly The Voice, where Snoop Dogg had just joined as a judge.
NBCU created audience segments for viewers who saw Snoop on-screen during the Olympics and then cross-referenced them with recent and lapsed watchers of The Voice, as well as people who had never watched. This targeting strategy led to a 19% increase in viewership this season, according to the NBCU presentation.
“If Olympics viewers spend more than 10% of their total time during the Olympics watching entertainment, they improve their churn on the platform considerably,” Kaplan said. “So just getting them over that 10% mark was critical to us.”
And it works in reverse too. Just over 3% more sports fans on Peacock watched the second episode of Love Island USA compared to the first week. Kaplan noted that Love Island and live sports share more qualities than you might expect — both rely on competition and appointment viewing.