On Saturday night, NBCUniversal will make media history. For the first time, a National Football League playoff game — this one featuring the Kansas City Chiefs and the Miami Dolphins — will appear exclusively on a streaming service.
And at NBCUniversal’s offices in New York and Los Angeles, executives are all too aware of the high stakes for the company and particularly its streaming service, Peacock.
“There’s a lot riding on this game,” Kelly Campbell, Peacock’s president, said in an interview. “We feel that pressure.”
The pressure is coming from many fronts. There’s a technical challenge: First-round N.F.L. playoff games regularly draw audiences of nearly 30 million people. Can Peacock, a service that has a much smaller subscriber base than rivals like Netflix, Disney+ and Max, handle a crushing traffic surge without suffering an embarrassing technological snafu?
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