Breaking the Glass Wall: NBCUniversal's Matt Strauss On Building Tomorrow's Fandom-First Streaming Platform

"Every year," says Matt Strauss, "thousands of us come to SXSW to talk about the future of media and entertainment. And for the last several years, we've been having some version of the same conversation: streaming wars, subscriber growth, churn, cost-cutting, and consolidation. None of that is wrong. But it's incomplete."

Instead, he says, NBCUniversal has been focused on a different question: How do we deepen the relationship between fans and the stories they love?

Presenting as a SXSW featured speaker, Strauss laid out a new vision and a strategy for the next era of streaming. Beyond focusing on who has the most subscribers, he says, the real battleground is who earns the most share of time.

NBCUniversal is home to some of fandom's most beloved franchises. On television alone: SNL, The Office, Law & Order, The Real Housewives, and The Traitors are just a few of many titles that command devoted audiences. That industry-leading IP is paired with industry-leading access: in many cases, fans can watch any episode at any time, 24/7. 

"If you love video," says Strauss, "there's no better time to be alive than now." And yet, he says, "it can still feel like work. Endless scrolling. Endless searching." The problem, he says, is not that the content isn't great, but that the experience around the content hasn't evolved as fast as the fandom. 

Streaming TV isn't enough anymore

Noting that the industry spends billions creating premium stories to get viewers deeply engaged, Strauss asks what happens when the episode ends. "We push them to the next show," he says. "The next movie. The next binge. It's binary: watch… and move on."

But fans often don't want to move on. "When someone finishes an episode of Love Island, they don't think 'What else can I watch?' They think, 'Who can I talk to about Rob?'" It's a series that people watch together and then immediately go looking for the next layer: reactions, theories, clips, communities. 

He notes that during the height of the last season, the No. 1 app on the app store wasn't ChatGPT or TikTok, it was the Love Island App. ChatGPT was No. 2. 

"The appetite for deeper connection is real," he says. 

The next era of entertainment won't just be about streaming shows, he says. It will be about entering the worlds those shows create. 

For 100 years, NBCUniversal has navigated moments when technology changed faster than the language we used to describe it.

"Long before we called it 'broadcasting,' we were building live national audiences," Strauss says. "Before 'appointment viewing,' we were creating must-see TV. Before 'IP' became a balance-sheet term, we were building franchises that shaped culture. We didn’t follow formats. We followed the fans."

It's that instinct – finding the white space before it even has a name – that has let NBCUniversal reinvent itself again and again. "Across theme parks, studios, film, television, sports, and news – we're built to think in symphony, not in silos. And there's no better example of that mindset than Peacock."

How Peacock was built to reimagine broadcast television – and what's coming up next

When Peacock launched in 2020, the market was very different. Much of the industry had declared linear "dead." Most streamers, Strauss notes, were focused on scripted, binge drops, and ad-free. "And yes," he agrees, "those are important ways some people engage with content."

But TV, Strauss says, is also about something else: "Timeliness. Urgency. Collective viewing. Live events. Sports. Reality and unscripted. News. Multigenerational franchises. And yes – even advertising."

The platform was designed with those kinds of audiences in mind. "Peacock wasn't built to chase other streamers," he says. 

Now, the focus is on building an experience that remembers the fan. Strauss lays out several new Peacock features designed to bring fandom in and earn more of the fan's time. 

First: new video formats

"There is no device more personal than your phone," he says, and most of the time viewers are holding it vertically, navigating with their thumb or fingertip. And yet most streaming experiences are built primarily for horizontal viewing. 

Peacock was the first streamer to introduce vertical video across genres. Now the platform has gone even further with Saturday Night Live, giving fans a choice to watch full episodes or a swipeable version that lets them move sketch to sketch. 

This snackable format is a discovery engine that drives more sessions and repeat viewing, and this spring, Peacock will expand to include live vertical video, using AI to clip the action in a live event, like an NBA game, crop in real time and give it to fans to share the moment. 

Second: new ways to control the platform

Fans have made it loud and clear – they want a more immersive experience when it comes to live events. That’s why NBCUniversal introduced Peacock Performance View – a feature providing real-time stats, probabilities, and graphical overlays that blur the line between sports and video games.

And in the Winter Olympics, fans embraced a new feature called Rinkside Live for both hockey and figure skating, where viewers got to choose camera angles, dedicated feeds, and more ways to go deeper into the action.

Third: new ways to participate

A suite of games and companion experiences are coming, including an AI-powered Law & Order crime solving experience in development with Wolf Games. The Traitors podcast, which is the No. 1 TV and film podcast, is one of many companion productions designed to give fans more of the world they enjoy.

Fourth: Your Bravoverse

Noting there may be no bigger fandom than Bravo, Your Bravoverse uses generative AI to weave decades of Bravo footage into a first-of-its-kind personalized experience, where watching and discovering happen together, all guided by a digital avatar of Andy Cohen, created using AI.

All these immersive experiences, current and upcoming, are designed around a simple principle: the episode is not the ending. It's the beginning of a deeper, more engaged fandom.

"What I'm describing today isn't a feature roadmap," Strauss says. "Not a reshuffled homepage. Not a slightly upgraded rental shelf."

Streaming, he says, shouldn't push people away from the worlds they love. It should pull them deeper inside. 

The glass wall era, Strauss says, is ending.

"This is how you earn more share of time. This is how you keep communities where they belong – inside the ecosystem that sparked them."