NBCUniversal's Peacock To Stream More Sports

Boston Celtics and Philadelphia Phillies fans will soon be able to watch their teams’ games on NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service. 

The entertainment company plans to add its regional sports channels to Peacock as soon as early 2025, according to people familiar with the plans.

The Wall Street Journal reports the four NBC Sports networks that will be added have local broadcast rights in Boston, Philadelphia and across Northern California, including to games for high-profile teams such as the Phillies of Major League Baseball and the Golden State Warriors and Celtics of the National Basketball Association. The games will continue to be available on television.

The company is still completing details of the plan and the rollout could be delayed. One option executives are discussing is to make the channels available as add-ons in the local markets so that fans there can pay extra to stream games. 

As major entertainment companies compete to attract customers to their streaming services, many are turning to live sports as a way to differentiate their offerings and appeal to cable-TV cord-cutters. Even Netflix, which has long stayed away from live sports, has begun buying the rights to one-time events, such as this season’s Christmas Day NFL games.   

Earlier this year, NBCUniversal agreed to pay $2.5 billion a year for the rights to 100 NBA games per season across NBC and Peacock, as well as first- and second-round playoff games and six conference-finals series, The Wall Street Journal reported. The company already streams programming from the National Football League, Big Ten college sports, English Premier League soccer, golf and the Tour de France. 

Regional sports networks had 115 million subscribers at the end of 2023, a 29% drop from five years earlier. NBCU’s four wholly owned regional sports networks had 10.7 million subscribers at the end of 2023, down from 13.4 million five years earlier, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.