Comcast’s Peacock is strutting its stuff on center stage.
The company announced more details about its upcoming service Peacock at a special investor presentation Thursday. The latest entrant in the streaming revolution is expected to draw users away from traditional cable and satellite subscriptions and more towards over-the-top and subscription replacements.
Peacock can be seen as a way for Comcast to hedge their losses and plan for the future. The service will have three tiers. An ad-supported version with 7,500 hours of programming will be free for everyone. There will also be a full version that includes 15,000 hours of programming with original content, which will be $4.99 for an ad-supported version and $10 for an ad-free version. Comcast and Cox customers will get the full ad-supported version for free. Of the major streaming subscription services, only Hulu currently allows for traditional advertising.
The service previously announced it will be the exclusive home for hit content including “The Office,” “30 Rock,” the “Law and Order” series, and “Parks and Recreation,” as well as Universal movies like the “Fast & Furious” and “Back to the Future” franchises. It will also have original series like reboots of “Punky Brewster,” “Battlestar Galactica” and “Saved by the Bell,” in addition to a new series based of the novel “Brave New World” and the podcast “Dr. Death.”
Comcast is expected to spend about $2 billion on content. New shows including “MacGruber” and DreamWorks Animation series like “Madagascar: A Little Wild” will debut on the service. “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon” and “Late Night with Seth Meyers” will post at 8 p.m. ET ahead of its late-night airings. And, a joint-venture live-news service between NBC News and Sky will stream on the platform.
As a telecommunications company, Comcast has been in an interesting position as the number of cable subscriptions dwindle. The five largest pay-TV services lost a total of 3.2 million customers in 2018 or about 4.2 percent, according to their company reports. The numbers have continued to decline, including a 1.74 million subscriber drop in Q3 of 2019 alone, according to Leichtman Research Group.
To launch the service, Comcast is pulling many of its shows from rival streamers. It reportedly paid $500 million for a five-year deal to move “The Office” off of Netflix and onto Peacock. It is also expected to move shows from Hulu to Peacock once their current deals expire. Exclusivity rights with Hulu end as early as this year, and Comcast can cancel its licensing agreements starting in 2022. Comcast was previously a partial owner of Hulu, but the company sold its stake to Disney for $5.8 billion through a deal announced in May 2019.
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A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
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It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
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