JULY 17, 2025

Welcome back to Buffering, where we’ve got a lot to get to this week, including some exclusive scoop on Peacock’s latest pricing play and some thoughts on what normal folks can do in the wake of the Republican war on public broadcasting. As always, thanks for reading.

—Joe Adalian, Vulture's West Coast editor

Photo: Ben Symons/Peacock via Getty Images

Love might not cost a thing, but watching Love Island on Peacock? That’s about to get more expensive, Buffering has learned. Starting Wednesday (July 23), the NBCU-owned streamer will begin charging new subscribers $3 more per month, with the cost of the ad-supported plan increasing nearly 40 percent to $10.99 and the price of the ad-free tier rising about 20 percent to $16.99. (Existing subscribers will see the new rates starting with bills on or after August 22.) And while Peacock is also going to be testing out a new slimmed-down version of its offering for $7.99 called "Peacock Select" — more on that below — this price hike means Peacock’s most popular plan (ad-supported) will cost $1 more per month than Max, Hulu, and Disney+ with ads; $2 more than stand-alone Prime Video; and $3 more than the ad-supported tiers at Netflix and Paramount+. It’s the biggest price jump for Peacock since the platform’s launch five years ago this week, and means the NBCU service (for now) has the most expensive ad tier of any major streamer.

While consumers obviously won’t be happy about Peacock’s new price — especially since it comes on top of another $2 increase rolled out a year ago this month — the move is not entirely unexpected. For one thing, almost all streamers have sharply raised rates the past few years, and Peacock likely won’t be the last to do so this year. But this specific increase seemed inevitable in the wake of NBCU’s massive investment in sports content — particularly the NBA, which arrives on the platform in October. NBCU has been loading up Peacock with sports properties in recent years, betting the NBA and other leagues will allow it to more effectively compete with legacy studio-owned rivals such as HBO Max, Paramount+, and even Disney’s Hulu and Disney+ (which leave most sports content to sibling ESPN). In Comcast’s most recent earnings call, chief financial officer Jason Armstrong, said “a critical piece” of NBCU’s streaming strategy “is our focus on sports.” And Comcast president Mike Cavanagh echoed that idea, saying sports programming has “been a very key driver of Peacock,” and has helped in “acquiring new [subscribers], getting engagement with our subs and leading to engagement in non-sports content.” Cavanagh said Comcast is looking at the NBA “as a launch pad to further scale Peacock and further monetize it.”

But getting the rights to All the Sports is not cheap. For the NBA alone, NBCU is paying a staggering $2.45 billion a year, or nearly $27 billion over the 11-year life of the deal, per multiple reports. Some of those costs will be offset by advertising, of course: Just this week, NBCU said that — in no small part because of the new sports content (read: the NBA) — upfront ad sales across all its platforms, including Peacock, jumped 15 percent this year, with the streamer’s ad volume growing by 20 percent and accounting for nearly one-third of all NBCU upfront dollars. While those are strong numbers, it still leaves a long way to go for NBCU if it hopes to break even on the NBA deal. So for many observers, it was obvious from the minute the hoops pact closed that NBCU was going to have to adjust its revenue equation to make the financials even begin to work. Hence, the inevitability of the Peacock price hike.

The Cost-Benefit of Peacock's Biggest Price Increase Yet

Still, the scale of the increase — $3 per month for both existing tiers — is on the higher end of streaming-era price hikes, and on the surface, it also feels like a bit of a gamble given Peacock’s lower subscription base (about 41 million as of last April) compared to its major rivals. But as eye-popping as the number is — and as loud as the online grumbling about this news will almost certainly, and perhaps even understandably, will be — Peacock’s price play is actually in line with how several other streamers have been adjusting their fees lately. For instance, Apple TV+, which has more scripted originals (and far more Emmy nominations) than Peacock, but no real library content and just a fraction of Peacock’s sports offering, raised its price by $3 (to $9.99) in 2023, just a year after a $2 price jump. Similarly, Disney jacked up the cost of Hulu and Disney+ without ads by $3 in 2023 and then raised the cost another $2 a year later. Even Hulu with ads — arguably the streaming option most similar to Peacock, at least in terms of entertainment content — saw a very steep price curve between 2021 and 2024, increasing more than 60 percent, from $5.99 to $9.99 monthly. And while Netflix’s ad-supported plan hasn’t suffered from the same sort of inflation, it’s also less than three years old — and represents a distinct minority of the platform’s overall subscriber base. By contrast, over 80 percent of Peacock subscribers are on the ad-supported tier. In other words, despite Netflix’s lower ad tier price, the typical Netflix subscriber will pay more every month than the average Peacock customer, even after this increase.

Even so, the thinking inside NBCU seems to be that the most appropriate comparison point for Peacock’s value proposition actually isn’t Netflix or Hulu at all. Talking to advertisers in May, Mark Marshall, NBCU’s chairman of global advertising and partnerships, argued that, “Peacock was built on sports,” and noted that the platform “will have over 7,500 hours of sports in the next year alone — more than Amazon Prime Video, Paramount+, Hulu, Max, Apple TV, and Netflix combined.” Because of this sports overload, Peacock insiders seem to believe their price is best judged next to what Disney has said it will charge consumers each month for the standalone ESPN app ($29.99) or whatever price Fox puts on Fox One, its new standalone service bundling all of Fox’s sports content with its primetime fare (anywhere from $15-$25 a month, per industry speculation). Framed that way, of course, Peacock looks like a bargain; consumers will ultimately decide whether they think this is spin or a fair argument. But as evidenced by Amazon’s big bet on Thursday Night Football, Apple’s reported interest in F1 racing, and even Netflix’s recent investment in live boxing, wrestling, and a couple of NFL games, it’s clear other streamers also consider sports a huge growth opportunity and a way to limit churn and increase engagement. Peacock, however, is putting a lot of its digital eggs in this specific basket.

For folks not that into sports, of course, all this extra content won’t do much to relieve the sting of the price hikes. On that front, Peacock’s messaging is that the service also has also been spending more on red-hot unscripted series such as Love Island (and its many spin-offs) and The Traitors, and that it offers all NBC primetime and late-night programming (including weekly SNL simulcasts); everything from the Bravo-verse (including approximately 10 million hours of Real Housewives and Below Deck library episodes); and streaming premieres of Universal feature hits like Oppenheimer and Wicked (though the latter film is about to leave Peacock for Prime Video, since Peacock’s initial streaming window for Universal pictures is five months). Despite all that programming, if history is a guide, more than a few current subscribers will churn out rather than pay up.

But Peacock execs may be willing to take a modest hit to churn rates now, both because of the additional revenue the higher prices (and the NBA) will bring in, as well as to better position the platform for streaming’s bundled future. Consider: When Disney began a series of price hikes for Hulu and then Disney+ a few years ago, it also ramped up promotion of its own Disney Bundle, which gives customers two platforms for just a couple dollars more than one service alone. Similarly, price increases at HBO Max and the Disney streamers were also soon followed by Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney teaming up on a bundle of HBO Max, Disney+, and Hulu last year. So by establishing a more robust baseline for Peacock now, NBCU may be hoping to make the price of a future package of Peacock and one or two other streamers look all the more affordable.

In the meantime, Peacock is taking a few steps to counter potential churn. The most notable is the aforementioned experiment with a lower-priced, ad-supported $7.99 tier it’s calling Peacock Select. Though it won’t be heavily marketed, and could even go away at some point — hence messaging that this is a “test” — the new price plan will give customers access to all next-day NBC and Bravo entertainment content (i.e., your Dick Wolf dramas, SNL and the Housewives), former NBC soap Days of Our Lives (now a Peacock original), plus “a broad assortment of library titles.” But paying $3 less than Peacock Premium will also come with a big trade-off: No NBC Sports programming (including NBC’s Sunday Night Football; no Peacock originals like Love Island, Traitors or, if it returns, Poker Face; and no streaming movie premieres like the upcoming Wicked sequel. Instead, Peacock Select seems like a bid to hold on to cord-cutting NBC superfans who used to stream the network’s shows via Hulu (or cable). The logic here is the same Warner Bros. Discovery used when it decided to not kill off Discovery+ after its content got folded into HBO Max: Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Peacock is also continuing to offer one other way of saving money: Its annual plans, which essentially let users lock in 12 months of the service for the price of 10. Under the new price structure that kicks in on Wednesday, a year-long subscription to Peacock will cost either $109.99 (with ads) or $169.99 (without commercials), lowering the effective price of Peacock to roughly $9 and $14 per month, respectively. That’s an increase of $30 over the current rates for annual subscriptions. If you’re already on an annual plan, you can’t extend another year at the new rate, but the good news is, you won’t get hit with the $30 price hike until your current term ends. The online debate about the wisdom of Peacock’s new price, on the other hand? That starts now.

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Photo: AppleTV+

Remember Mitt Romney, the former GOP nominee for president and U.S. Senator from Utah who got all sorts of favorable press coverage for every once in a while acting as if he was opposed to Donald Trump’s MAGA brand of “conservatism”? While Romney’s personal distaste for Trump was almost certainly genuine, on most major political issues, the two men are soulmates. So today, Romney should be toasting his supposed nemesis for all but accomplishing something he (and many other Republicans) have been trying to do for decades: Kill federal funding for public broadcasting.

Early this morning, the Senate approved Trump’s budget recession bill that will almost immediately claw back about $535 million in already-approved funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which spends most of its budget on grants to local PBS and NPR stations. (The funding had been approved for the next two years, so the overall cutback will total a bit more than $1 billion.) Romney famously made defunding public broadcasting a cornerstone of his 2012 run for the White House, telling voters it was a waste of resources: “I happen to think it’s immoral for us to keep spending money we don’t have, and passing on to our kids our obligations,” he said, arguing the private sector could replace PBS. “We’re not going to kill Big Bird, but Big Bird is going to have advertisements.” Romney lost, and Congress continued to keep spending (relatively tiny) amounts on public broadcasting.

But this week, Trump — always looking for a shiny object — is forcing his minions in Congress to muscle through a bill that ends the modest subsidy for the CPB (along with billions in foreign aid and other noble causes.) There’s a small chance the House won’t be able to give final approval before a Friday deadline, but even if it doesn’t, it seems likely Trump will eventually find a way to cut off the funding so he can brag about doing something “lame” Republicans like Romney never could.

The good news, such as it is, is that this move doesn’t mean PBS will stop airing Masterpiece or NPR will cancel All Things Considered. PBS and NPR have long gotten most of their funding from sources outside of government, something which makes the rantings of Romney and Trump all the more repugnant and hypocritical. Unlike the BBC or CBC — true national broadcasters who get most of their funding from their respective governments — PBS has always relied on private grants and audience donations. It’s exactly the sort of public-private partnership Republicans supposedly favor, and while it’s meant PBS and NPR have never been nearly as essential or prolific in their programing as other national broadcasters, it has at least made both institutions somewhat immune from a wannabe autocrat like Trump either shutting them down or taking them over to serve his own purposes. (If you don’t think either would be an option, just look at what the White House is trying to do to Voice of America.)

Still, killing funding to CPB is expected to have lots of devastating effects at the local level for many public radio and TV stations. CPB grants help keep a number of smaller stations — including many in Trump-loving rural America — afloat. Without this funding, many of these outlets are going to have to either make massive programming cuts, reduce staff, or, if the worst fears are realized, go off the air completely. That will mean many small towns and cities will be cut off from vital sources of information and independent journalism — all because Republicans like Romney and Trump think NPR and PBS are wastes of money and biased against conservatives.

There are few things people who support public broadcasting can do if the House makes the cuts official. You can set up a recurring donation to your local PBS or NPR station, or increase your donation if you already give. NPR offers NPR+, which starts at $8 a month and offers ad-free podcasts and other perks. And over at PBS, you can do something that helps your local stations while also giving you something much better than a tote bag in return: Sign up for PBS Passport. While PBS has a free app that offers many recent episodes of its shows on-demand, Passport unlocks a giant library of PBS drama, educational and cultural programing — including Vulture faves like All Creatures Great and Small. Unlike Peacock (or other commercial streamers), there’s no set price for Passport, though there is a minimum donation of $5 per month. But you can also give $100 a year or $15 a month — whatever you can afford to help offset the loss of federal funding. And the beauty here is the Passport subscription charge is really a direct donation to your local PBS station, as is a membership to NPR+.

So if you’re upset about what the party of Romney and Trump is doing to public broadcasting, you have the power to at least partially undo their actions. It’s hardly ideal, but for now, it’s arguably the best weapon PBS and NPR have in their battle to survive this latest assault on their very existence.

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