A Legacy of Disruption: NBCUniversal's Matt Strauss On 100 Years of Moving Fast and Building Things

As Legendary February kicks off on Feb. 6, the company prepares to do something never before attempted in media history – delivering the Winter Olympics, Super Bowl Weekend, and NBA All-Star all in a single 17-day burst of live sports action. On the eve of the Milan Cortina Opening Ceremony, Chairman of NBCUniversal Media Group Matt Strauss sat down with Fast Company's Jeff Beer to talk about NBC's 100-year history of disruption, the innovations on hand for an unprecedented February, and the company's strategy going forward. 

New technology and expanding capabilities are a big part of the conversation, but, says Strauss, the strategy goes beyond simply developing "the shiny new thing." NBCUniversal's goal, a goal which defined the company's first century and continues to drive it into the next, is both simpler and harder than developing new tech: to surprise and delight viewers. Superserving fans and giving them more than they expect is the north star that guides programming, tech development, content strategy, and beyond. That goal is the anchor of the network's bid to define and claim a commanding lead in the world of live events.

How NBCUniversal defines innovation – the evolution of Olympics coverage

The common thread that connects NBC from the radio era – NBC's first live Olympics radio coverage was from the 1932 Lake Placid Winter Games – through this year's Legendary February is a desire to create the most immersive experience possible. To that end, the first and most important question NBCUniversal asks is not "how can we innovate?" but "why?"

"Innovation starts with goals," Strauss says. "What are you really trying to accomplish? What we've tried to do is approach it as a discipline, which is we're trying to superserve fandoms. We're trying to surprise and delight." Overdelivering to delighted fans – giving viewers more than they were expecting – is key to the network's strategy to both grow and retain audiences. 

"We're constantly stress testing innovation – does it accomplish those goals? Does this really add more value to the fan? Will it help drive more engagement? Does it make our platform stickier? And are we also, you know, surprising and delighting them? Are we doing something that they didn't expect?"

That commitment to surprise and delight, and to superserving Olympics fans, paid off two years ago with NBCUniversal's acclaimed coverage of the 2024 Paris Summer Games. With over 7,000 hours of coverage, 300 live events in a day, and on some days up to 60 concurrent live events streaming at the same time, Paris was a tremendous technological challenge, both on the backend and on the user-facing side of the network's platforms. 

"It wasn't that long ago that the way you enjoyed the Olympics was you tuned in to the prime time show and you watched 3 or maybe 4 hours. You can't give somebody 7,000 hours and say go figure it out," Matt says. "How do you navigate that? How do you search that?" Solving the problems of searching, finding, and discovering events became just as critical a challenge as delivering the stream in the first place. 

Marrying that technical capability with NBCUniversal's Olympic storytelling experience has been years in development. "Product and innovation are typically iterative," Matt says. "If you go back to London 2012, that was really the first time we made all of the Olympic content available where you can catch up on demand. Something that was very, very popular in Paris where Scott Hansen was doing the Gold Zone, we actually experimented with that back in 2016 in Sochi. We trialed it. We tested it. You test, you learn, and you make it better. And I think Paris, it was almost a decade in the making. And everything just really worked. It's a real credit to the product teams, to the marketing teams, to the teams that do the prime time show like Molly Solomon. Everything came together in a way where I felt we were really able to demonstrate putting the customer first."

Paris was by all accounts a landmark success for NBCUniversal, with critical acclaim, fan engagement, and record ratings. Internal numbers back that appraisal as well: digital consumption during Paris 2022 was 40% higher than all previous Olympics combined. As the network looks to top its own Olympic records, then, the fan-first philosophy will continue to inform all sides of the business. 

Milan Cortina coverage will also be expansive with an unprecedented 3,200+ hours covering every event. Even more than Paris, streaming platforms are hardened for reliability and designed for search and functionality to immerse viewers in the action like never before. 

Delivering streaming with the reliability audiences expect from television

Show of hands, how many sports fans enjoy a glitchy connection in the middle of a game? How about dropped sound, or a buffer bar? Peacock's streaming engine was designed from the outset with reliability in mind, always in service of the primary goal of surprising and delighting viewers. Nothing breaks immersion like a glitchy platform. 

It's a lesson Matt, with his Comcast background, has taken to heart. "The tolerance of a sports fan when the video isn't working, when there's pixelation, when the sound quality's bad… it's zero," he says. "Like, it has to work." 

That "it has to work" mantra has been in place from the beginning. When Peacock launched in 2020, NBCUniversal was already thinking about live events and live sports as key to a cross-platform  growth strategy. At a time when some executives in the industry were questioning whether sports was going to continue to factor, and premium scripted dramas seemed like the future of streaming, Peacock instead was building out for live programming at scale. Live, as it turns out, was far from dead. 

It's that focus on throughput that lets NBCUniversal deliver the Olympics, the Super Bowl (in 4K), NBA All-Star and dozens of simultaneous events to millions of users, all at the high level of immersion and quality of storytelling NBC is known for. 

How NBCUniversal culture fuels creativity and execution

It's ultimately to the credit of the teams, and to the dedicated people at NBCUniversal, their interconnectedness, and their synergy that the network's live coverage is greater than the sum of its parts. 

"Coming from Comcast, being there for 20 years," says Strauss, "Comcast is a matrixed organization. To really thrive in that environment, you need to be incredibly collaborative. You need to have open communication. And you also want a culture where people are not afraid to fail, where people are not afraid to provide their ideas or their opinions."

"You need to be incredibly collaborative," he says. "You need to have open communication. And you also want a culture where people are not afraid to fail, where people are not afraid to provide their ideas or their opinions."

With unprecedented live event coverage throughout the year amounting to roughly 40% of all major events, plus scripted entertainment, news, films, Universal parks experiences, products, and more, NBCUniversal is able to combine efforts into a virtuous circle of mutually supporting businesses that build on one another's successes. "It's a huge responsibility we all take really seriously," says Strauss.

Broadcast is a megaphone for driving cross-platform momentum

Far from a liability, live events, along with broadcast in general, are an asset across the portfolio. Broadcast acts as a megaphone, with the power to bring fandoms from marquee moments like the Olympics to the Peacock library, to the parks, film, television, products, all of which in turn drive to one another and back to broadcast.

Strauss gives an example of The Paper, the Greg Daniels spinoff of The Office that premiered on Peacock. Six months later, flipping the conventional window, The Paper aired on NBC, driving different audiences to check out full episodes on streaming as well as Peacock itself. 

That willingness to reinvent the paradigm, to put the streaming window ahead of broadcast, to lean into things like podcasting, gaming, vertical video, to use live events to drive to scripted and vice versa, is key to the success of a fan-forward strategy. Taking more share of time by rewarding the viewer's time continues to drive results.

Advancing how we deliver tentpole events

"We're not going backwards," says Strauss. "Everything that you saw in Paris is going to continue in Milan." NBCUniversal has many surprises in store for Legendary February, all geared toward putting fans in the action like never before. Some of the innovations to watch for include:

• Multiview Goes Mobile – Fans watching the Paris Olympics on television in 2024 could view up to four different events simultaneously. Now for the first time, mobile-forward fans like Gen Z viewers will be able to watch the same parallel live events on their phone as well.
• 4K All Day – Super Bowl Sunday action will be more crisp than a bowl of chips as both Olympic and Super Bowl LX coverage will offer 17 hours of 4K HDR coverage. 
• Multiple Angles – Viewers of marquee events like figure skating and ice hockey will be able to select from among multiple camera angles, as well as behind-the-scenes views of training centers, player benches and more. 
• Games at the Games – Social games like trivia contests and prediction contests let fans get in on the action.
• Creator Collective – In 2024, NBCUniversal brought 27 influencers and content creators to Paris, supplied them with studio equipment and access to the athletes, and let them do their thing. With 65 million followers, 300 million views, and approximately 6.5 billion impressions, Creator Collective managed to engage audiences who don't view conventional broadcast coverage in conventional ways. That program also is looking to double down for Milan Cortina. 

A legacy of moving fast and building things

Legendary February is a fitting way to kick off NBC100, a year-long celebration of a company that has spent 100 years changing what is possible in media. 

That legacy doesn't imply old-fashioned, and it never did. As NBCUniversal enters its second century of surprising and delighting audiences, the long history of firsts provides depth and perspective. Experience across multiple cycles of change lends itself to a clearer distinction between trends and fundamentals, enabling strategic pattern recognition instead of reactive decision-making. 

As it starts its next chapter, the company is focused on driving growth and cultural relevance through long-term investments across franchises and platforms – expanding immersive storytelling through new parks and experiences, strengthening its industry-leading studios through top creative partnerships, continuing to invest in Peacock to bring iconic franchises and live moments to audiences in new ways, and leveraging its unmatched sports and live events portfolio to deliver cultural tentpoles like Legendary February – positioning the company to keep evolving how stories are told, how audiences engage, and how it shapes culture into its next century.