Peacock Overhauls Mobile App for Vertical Video Era in Effort to “Win Another Hour Per User, Per Month”

Peacock mobile users might want to check their app store for updates — the NBCUniversal streaming platform is undergoing its largest mobile revamp ever.

Peacock mobile 2.0 (it’s probably well beyond 2.0, but stick with us here) is designed to, in part, “win another hour per user, per month,” Matt Strauss, chairman of NBCUniversal Media Group, told a small group of reporters including The Hollywood Reporter on Tuesday. Peacock has been profitable for two straight quarters now, and it’s part of Strauss’s job to keep it that way.

To accomplish that reasonable-sounding goal, NBCU is overhauling Peacock’s smartphone display and functionality for the vertical video craze, which it boasts as having been early money on, as well as the Comcast entertainment brand’s fandoms and its sports content.

Peacock users who use the app on both their TV and smartphone double the engagement of those who only sign in on their television. As John Jelley, the group’s senior vice president of product and UX (user experience), sees it, today’s opportunity is on the smaller of the two screens.

“Every streamer today is really a sea of sameness on the homepage. Because they’ve taken a TV experience and largely ported it over, they are expecting the user to do the sorting,” Jelley said. “We see an opportunity to recognize what a fan is trying to accomplish in that session and make the next most useful action easier to find.”

“We recognize that we have to start thinking of ourselves less as a streaming platform and more of an entertainment platform,” Strauss said. “How do we super serve our franchises and our fandoms where the best experience is on our app?”

To those ends, “conversational AI search” will help users find what they want even if they don’t know how to directly express it. Short clips that lead to full episodes will expedite and elongate engagement, and franchise/fandom hubs can be a one-stop shop for fans of the Bravo-verse, for one standout example. There will also be games (like Law & Order: Clue Hunter and Public Eye) and a membership program “giving eligible subscribers exclusive rewards, benefits and activities tied to the movies and shows they enjoy,” per the official announcement.

One particularly cool idea is adaptive live viewing. Peacock plans to expand its live vertical video tests to The Voice live simulcasts, NCAA basketball games and, in a clear direct response to the rise of YouTube Golf, you guessed it: golf. A “dynamic video player” will switch between vertical and horizontal video playback automatically depending on the device orientation, keeping key action in frame.

NBA games will soon get the same treatment, with “easy access to player stats” and “deeper game information sitting directly underneath the live feed in a dual screen view,” the executives say.

Finally, these days, you cannot talk about vertical video without discussing microdramas. Jelley discusses them frankly, because he says that’s how his users speak about them.

“When we talk to users about microdramas, they’re not embarrassed by them. They don’t feel that they’re something they’ll just do in private,” Jelley said. “They’re watching them at home at different moments of the day, they’re watching them on the commute. We are very committed to premium long-form content, and that has a massive place not only on the phone, but also on TV. But this is really another modality.”