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Peacock review: NBC's streaming service is nice for a few dates, not a lifelong commitment
Though it's home to a few notable exclusives, including 'Wicked' and 'Nosferatu,' Peacock falls a bit short overall.
Want to unwind with some episodes of The Office? Watch all the Harry Potter movies with the kids? See what Bridget Jones has been up to, lo these many years? (Apparently she's gone mental over some young fella.) Peacock is the NBCUniversal-owned streaming service that's home to all that and plenty more, including original movies and TV series, a smattering of sports and an extensive selection of "channels."
It's also the exclusive place to find some major movie releases not long after they've left the theater: Conclave, Nosferatu, The Wild Robot and Wicked, to name a few notable recent ones. The price tag is reasonable, too, especially if you're able to snag one of Peacock's occasional discount offers. However, certain aspects of the interface are irritating, and I'm often left feeling there's more and better content available elsewhere. (You may disagree; these are just my preferences talking.) Here's my Peacock review.
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VERDICT: If you like NBC news, sports and TV series, you'll probably be happy having Peacock as part of your streaming lineup. However, it feels a little light overall, and certain aspects of the interface are annoying.
- Solid, varied collection of movies and TV series, including some exclusives
- All sports programming included in basic tier
- Lots of kid-friendly content
- Telemundo Hub for Spanish-language viewers
- Feels light on content compared to some services
- Interface needs work, especially for browsing
- Settings menu difficult to locate
Peacock: What will it cost you?
In its earlier days, Peacock offered a totally free tier with access to a subset of its library. That's gone, alas, leaving you with either a Premium or Premium Plus subscription (the former a bit of a misnomer because premium, by definition, suggests there's something below it).
The two plans cost $7.99 and $13.99 per month, respectively, or $79.99 and $139.99 annually. The latter options effectively give you two months free, a savings worth considering if you intend to keep the service for at least a year.
You should definitely be on the lookout for deals, though: Peacock occasionally offers a substantially discounted annual rate, such as $29.99 for one year of Premium. That works out to less than $3 per month, a pretty exceptional price.
So what does Premium Plus buy you? Ad-free viewing, for one thing, though keep in mind that you'll see commercials during any live content (such as sports) and possibly a handful of other streams as well. (Peacock notes there are "limited exclusions" from this promise of no ads.) That's pretty common; similar rules apply at Paramount+.
The Plus subscription also lets you download content for offline viewing (handy if you're getting on a plane and want to load up, say, a season's worth of Yellowstone). Finally, it includes a live-stream of local NBC channels in most areas.
Peacock: What kind of content does it have?
Just as Paramount+ plays host to past and present CBS shows, Peacock serves up current NBC offerings (such as St. Denis Medical, The Traitors and The Voice) along with some classics: Sanford and Son, Little House on the Prairie, The Bionic Woman, etc. Peacock is also the only place to catch all five seasons of Yellowstone (though, weirdly, its spin-off series 1883 and 1923 can be found only on Paramount+).
Like other streamers, Peacock is home to its share of originals; I've enjoyed Mrs. Davis, Poker Face and Day of the Jackal, to name a few.
There's also a rotating lineup of movies; at this writing, for example, you can watch a handful from the Fast & Furious franchise, the aforementioned Bridget Jones sequel (Mad About the Boy), various Shrek and Despicable Me entries and so on. And speaking of those latter titles, Peacock has a robust catalog of family-friendly fare, TV and movies alike.
On the sports front, you'll find live and recorded NBC Sports programming, which runs the gamut from Sunday Night Football to Premier League soccer to the summer and winter Olympics. There's also some college basketball and football as well as a whole section devoted to WWE wrestling.
Outside of sports and your local NBC station (the latter included only for Premium Plus subscribers), there's not a ton of live content here. In fact, although Peacock touts a channel guide with over 50 choices, it doesn't bear the label "live TV." That's because the majority of these โ Sitcom Staples, Comedy Movies, Peacock Reality and so on โ are simply the service's on-demand libraries reformatted as a channel guide. Only a handful of news and sports channels are actually live, and even those are mostly of the repackaged-from-various-sources variety. (For example, you won't find CNBC or MSNBC livestreams here, but some shows from the latter news channel are available after airing.)
You do get the Hallmark Channel, as well as plenty of Bravo content: Real Housewives, Below Deck, Vanderpump Rules, etc. And because NBC owns Telemundo, you'll find lots of Spanish-language content in Peacock's eponymous hub.
It's hard to say whether all this content amounts to good or bad, enough or not enough; it's simply what's there. Some of it you'll like, some you won't. Speaking personally, I've found less to enjoy on Peacock than I have, say, Hulu or Paramount+. But that's just me; if you want to perma-binge on the likes of The Office and Parks and Recreation, Peacock will be a good fit.
Peacock: What's the interface like?
I tested the service on a Sansui S55VOUG TV using both its native Google interface and a Roku Ultra streamer. The experience was largely identical, with a couple head-scratching exceptions.
At first blush, Peacock's interface closely resembles that of Disney's, Paramount's and others: A home screen stuffed with rows of recommended and categorical content, anchored by a fly-out main menu to take you to search, movies, live channels and more. It's a familiar, effective design, but things fall apart a bit once you venture into some of the sub-menus.
For example, head to Movies and you'll see a carousel of top picks, a row of personalized recommendations and then a set of "browse by genre" icons: comedy, drama, kids, etc. But when you choose any of these, you get one long page of matches sorted alphabetically; there's no further division, no additional categories or top picks or the like. Scrolling through an endless alphabetical set of thumbnails isn't a good time.
Similarly, the My Stuff page โ which is where you'll find any content you've marked for future viewing โ seems to be ordered completely at random. It's not alphabetical, not divided into TV and movies.
Search works well enough, with results appearing dynamically as you type and my standard "Tom Cruise" search producing a couple hits (including the underrated Far and Away). However, while voice search is available in Roku's Peacock app, it's not supported in Google's โ odd considering that the TV itself has that feature.
Like a lot of streamers, Peacock automatically plays a preview video of whatever your cursor lands on, which I find incredibly annoying. You can disable that โ if you can find the right menu. There's no settings icon in the main menu where you'd expect; instead, you have to scroll up and choose your profile, which takes you to the profile-selection page. No obvious settings menu there, either, though there is an "Account" option with the familiar gear icon alongside it โ but, nope, that's just account stuff, terms of service, privacy settings, etc.
No, to change this one setting, you have to actually edit your profile, which is done by selecting the little pencil that appears below the profile picture. None of this is difficult; it's just not intuitive, not logical.
To make matters worse, when I actually selected "Autoplay trailers" in order to toggle it off, a message informed me I had to venture into Roku accessibility settings in order to do this. That seemed odd.
Two final complaints. First, the aforementioned channel guide disappears far too quickly when you're browsing. Stop scrolling for just a few seconds and, poof, it's gone. And while the Roku version of the guide includes a categorical menu (News, Movies, Sports, etc.) so you can quickly jump to the section you want, the Google TV has no such shortcut menu.
Second, if you have the Premium plan, Peacock displays a full-screen ad seconds after you pause a movie or TV show. In a way that feels even more intrusive than the occasional commercial block.
Peacock: The verdict
Peacock is ... fine. For my money, it's a streamer you subscribe to for a month or two so you can binge favorite shows or watch a few movies that aren't available elsewhere, maybe some soccer or the Winter Olympics. It's definitely a strong choice for parents, as there's plenty of worthwhile stuff for kids.
I do wish the company would spend some time addressing the numerous interface annoyances, most of which feel like they could be fixed with a few lines of code. At least Peacock isn't overly expensive, especially if you snag one of those $30-for-a-whole-year deals. At that price it's easier to overlook the UI shortcomings.
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