Peacock, NBC’s new streaming service, launched on Wednesday, April 15, for Comcast customers, marking the network’s official entry in the crowded field dominated by the likes of Netflix and Hulu.
The service will be available to Comcast’s Xfinity X1 and Flex subscribers, who can access it by saying “Peacock” into their Xfinity Voice Remote. There’s no extra cost to access the service.
Peacock is slated to launch on July 15 for everyone else.
Drawing on NBC’s vast library of content, Peacock launches with more than 600 movies and 400 series. The service will also feature live news, sports, late-night TV (including a new show with Jimmy Fallon), and even reality shows.
The crown jewel of Peacock’s TV lineup will undoubtedly be The Office, the long-running sitcom that has become one of the most popular shows in the streaming world (though it won’t be immediately available at launch). Other noteworthy shows on Peacock include Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock, Downton Abbey, Friday Night Lights, and decades’ worth of Saturday Night Live. New episodes of current hit shows such as This Is Us will be available on Peacock the day after they air.
On the movie front, Peacock will offer films from the Universal, DreamWorks, and Illumination libraries, with titles such as Jurassic Park, Jaws, and the Fast and the Furious franchise. Peacock will also be home to new movies, including some projects by DreamWorks.
Peacock comes in two flavors: Premium and Free.
The Premium version will have over 15,000 hours of content and it will cost $10 per month, or $15 per month to make it ad-free. Comcast/Cox Communications subscribers get the ad-supported version for free with their subscription (and they can pay $5 to get rid of ads).
The Free version will have a mere 7,500 hours of content, and will be ad-supported.
If you’re looking for some non-Peacock programming to watch, check out our guides for the best shows and movies on Netflix, the best shows and movies on Hulu, or the best shows and movies on Amazon Prime.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?