Michigan kicks off the Big Tens streaming era on Peacock. Is everybody ready?

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — On the Saturday of Week 0, a mellow crowd gathered to watch the first moments of the college football season at Regents Field, a bar and restaurant near the Michigan campus.

NBC’s broadcast of the Notre Dame-Navy game was playing on televisions around the bar, drawing occasional glances from patrons. It was the calm before the storm of Week 1, when establishments in downtown Ann Arbor will be packed to capacity for Michigan’s season opener against East Carolina.

Advertisement

Starting this season, watching Big Ten games won’t always be as simple as flipping on the TV. The Michigan-ECU game is the first of nine Big Ten football games that will air exclusively on Peacock, NBC’s subscription-based streaming service, as part of a new set of media rights agreements that will generate more than $8 billion for the Big Ten over the next seven years.

GO DEEPER

What does pivot year mean for Big Ten viewing habits this fall?

With a week remaining before kickoff, Regents Field and other Ann Arbor establishments were still trying to figure out the technicalities of streaming the game.

“It’s less than ideal, and we’re still navigating it,” said Jacqueline Buda, co-founder of Regents Field. “We haven’t fully landed on all our solutions.”

Down the street, the managers of HopCat were working on the same issue. While fans can sign up for a residential Peacock subscription with relative ease, commercial venues need to buy something called a Peacock Sports Pass, which is sold through a third-party company and priced based on seating capacity. As of Saturday, management at HopCat was still trying to figure out how to make Peacock work with its existing TV setup.

“We are communicating with other businesses, trying to figure out what they’re doing before we pull the trigger on getting all new TVs,” said Sara Carter, assistant general manager at HopCat. “I think that’s going to be our last resort.”

The transition to a new era of live-streamed sports could come with a few bumps, but the Big Ten and its media partners are confident fans will adapt. Many made the switch to streaming already to watch the NFL’s Thursday Night Football package on Amazon or MLB games on Apple TV+. If fans want access to NBC’s full slate of Big Ten events, they will need to add Peacock to their streaming menu as well.

GO DEEPER

‘The biggest myth in football’: Halftime adjustments, only sometimes a thing

Along with a library of NBC shows like “The Office” and “Parks and Recreation,” Peacock offers a mix of sports content, from the Premier League to the Ryder Cup to NBC’s coverage of the Olympics. Peacock has exclusive rights to a Jan. 13 NFL wild-card game and a Dec. 23 matchup between the Bills and Chargers, plus one Notre Dame football game and more than 40 Big Ten men’s and women’s basketball games.

Advertisement

Comcast, NBCUniversal’s parent company, reported 24 million Peacock subscribers in its latest earnings report, up from 13 million paid subscribers a year ago. Peacock doesn’t provide viewership numbers on a game-by-game basis, but a recent Premier League match between Chelsea and Liverpool drew an average audience of 973,000 viewers, making it the most-streamed Premier League match on record.

Now that NBC has a share of the Big Ten’s media rights, Peacock is betting that fans of Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State — and eventually UCLA, USC, Oregon and Washington — will pay $5.99 per month to make sure they don’t miss a game.

“NBC are big believers in the Big Ten,” said Sam Flood, executive producer overseeing the majority of NBC’s sports coverage. “We wouldn’t have made this commitment to the conference if we didn’t believe in them. We’re also very excited about how they’re evolving and growing as a conference. All those things work well for what our goal is, which is to grow together with the Big Ten.”

The latest round of conference realignment showed the power of big brands to drive value for conferences and media companies. NBC wasted no time putting its biggest brands on Peacock, starting with Michigan-East Carolina in Week 1, Penn State-Delaware in Week 2 and the Washington-Michigan State game in Week 3.

NBC is bringing out the heavy hitters for the Big Ten’s Peacock debut, including play-by-play announcer Mike Tirico, who lives in Ann Arbor. Tirico and color analyst Chris Simms will have plenty to discuss, starting with the suspensions of Jim Harbaugh and offensive coordinator Sherrone Moore.

Michigan-East Carolina isn’t the most compelling matchup on the Week 1 slate, but the Wolverines are ranked No. 2 and have one of the largest audiences of any college football program. That creates an obvious draw for Peacock, a streaming service that wants to become a must-have for sports fans.

Advertisement

“I think you can count on one hand the number of universities that have the same impact as Michigan,” Flood said. “This is not a coincidence that this is how we’re launching our season on Peacock.”

Michigan fans will note with obvious trepidation the parallels to another season opener from the not-so-distant past: the 2007 loss to Appalachian State, one of the biggest upsets in college football history and the first game on the brand-new Big Ten Network.

Fans are hoping to avoid a repeat of history, both in the outcome of the game and the technicalities of accessing the broadcast. With kickoff fast approaching, some bar and restaurant owners were still scrambling.

Less than three weeks ago, NBC announced a licensing agreement that made EverPass Media the exclusive distributor of Peacock to commercial venues. EverPass partners with another company, UPshow, to provide devices similar to Amazon Fire Sticks that restaurant owners can plug into their TVs to stream Peacock.

Information about how to stream the game commercially only became available in the past two weeks, Buda said, which left Regents Field and other establishments with a tight deadline to get their technology in order. By Tuesday, Buda was feeling better about the options — as long as the internet signal holds up.

Carter is hoping HopCat will find a solution, too, preferably without buying 10 new TVs.

“We’re getting a little nervous,” Carter said, “but I’m pretty optimistic we’ll be able to figure something out last-minute.”

(Photo: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)

ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57k3Fob2tobnxzfJFsZmlwX2h9cLnInJ%2Bin5Gjeqe7zq2ZmqScYsC1vsSapKKml2K9pq3CqJqkZZKetG7AxKdm