“The Office” is settling in very well at Peacock, according to NBCUniversal chief Jeff Shell, who said Thursday that he thinks the beloved NBC sitcom has better “usage” on Peacock than it did on its old streaming home, Netflix.
“Very pleased with how [‘The Office’] is doing. Our usage, among our customers, [is] actually higher than we think the usage was among Netflix customers,” Shell said during NBCU parent company Comcast’s earnings call Thursday. “And more importantly, what’s happening is, we’re seeing that people who are watching ‘The Office’ on Peacock are watching lots of our other comedies. So it’s really driving ‘Parks & Rec’ and really driving ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine’ amongst others. So there’s kind of an ecosystem effect.”
“‘The Office’ has really worked,” he added.
Representatives for Netflix and NBCU did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment on Shell’s remarks about “The Office” usage on Netflix and Peacock.
“The Office” left Netflix, which boasts more than 203 million subscribers, at the end of 2020, launching Jan. 1 on NBCU’s Peacock, which revealed Thursday it’s up to 33 million subscribers since its July launch.
The first two seasons of “The Office” are available for free to all Peacock users. But to get access to Seasons 3-9, you need to subscribe to either the all-inclusive Peacock Premium tier for $4.99 a month or the all-inclusive and ad-free level, Peacock Premium Plus for $9.99.
Peacock has provided no viewership data for “The Office” yet, but if and when they do, it will have some big numbers to compete with from its Netflix days.
Since Nielsen began measuring viewing on streaming services last August, “The Office” did not come in lower than fifth on Nielsen’s weekly Top 10 list throughout the end of 2020 and averaged more than 1 billion minutes viewed for each of the final eight weeks of the year. (As with all streaming measurements, it’s impossible to determine how that translates into traditional viewers-per-episode on broadcast TV.)
Additionally, the Steve Carell-led sitcom appeared on Netflix’s self-curated Top 10 list for TV shows 178 times, the most of any show last year, according to data from Realgood, a streaming service search engine.