“We’re not trying to gain subscribers,” Jeff Shell says

NBC

Bad news for those of you non-Comcast customers looking to try out NBCUniversal’s new streaming service Peacock while stuck at home amid the pandemic: You’re still going to have to wait until the planned nationwide rollout in July, as NBCU does not intend on speeding up Peacock’s full launch to capitalize on the quarantine streaming boom because it doesn’t have to worry about gaining subscribers for the ad-supported service.

“Our goals on launching first with Comcast were twofold: 1) Get the product right technically, and 2) Learn some things about how people are using it so when we roll it out nationally we can go out with the best product,” NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell said during Comcast’s earnings call Thursday, which came two weeks after Peacock became available to the NBCU parent company’s subs on April 15.

“So why not pull it up and launch it earlier?” he re-posed to himself. “We’re in a marathon, not a sprint. We have an ad-supported service. We’re don’t see the value — we’re not trying to gain subscribers and we want to make sure the product is right before we launch in July. So this is kind of a measured strategy on our part and I think it’s the right strategy for Peacock and we’re very encouraged and even more optimistic on it long term.”

Shell says that “the early results” for Peacock two weeks into its Comcast-subs-only launch “are very, very encouraging, particularly the amount of time that each person is spending on the platform.”

“Our product is a very, very deep offering. We obviously didn’t launch with a lot of our splashy originals because of COVID, but we have so much on there that people are getting on there and spending a lot more time on there than we had originally anticipated, which is great news.”

Comcast reported its first-quarter 2020 earnings Thursday morning. Readers can find those results here.

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