If you watch Peacock on your phone, you may have stumbled upon a series of short-form clips that look an awful lot like something you’d find on Instagram Reels. They’re part of the platform’s vertical video experiment, and that experiment has performed well so far.
On the sports side, the Can’t Miss Highlights option, which shows moments from across the league, has been viewed by 15% of Peacock’s NBA viewers on mobile. That’s a solid adoption rate for a new feature. The videos have also led to increased overall viewership on Peacock, according to internal data.
“When people are coming in to the app, they’re often wanting to catch up on everything that’s happening,” John Jelley, senior vice president of Product and User Experience for Global Streaming at NBCUniversal Media Group, told TheWrap. “We wanted Peacock to be a one-stop-shop for all of the highlights from across the league, not only the games that are on Peacock.”
Peacock is able to show these moments because NBCUniversal has the rights to show NBA highlights on TV and streaming. Can’t Miss Highlights is also designed to show fans notable clips in close to real time. That immediacy has added to the offering’s success.
“What we’re seeing is users are coming in, they’re watching four, five, six or seven of these clips and then using it as a way to get directly into the live event,” Jelley said. “We’re really pleased with the performance of this so far, and we see this as being something we want to extend over time to more sports on the service.”
That includes the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics in February, which will also offer Can’t Miss Highlights for fans.
Peacock hasn’t just been experimenting with sports. The platform has also been testing how vertical video performs for its scripted and reality content. Short-form catch-up episodes, exclusive clips, highlights and upcoming trailers have all been tested on the platform. But one if its most interesting experiments to date involved “The Paper.” In the lead-up to Greg Daniels and Michael Koman’s “Office” spinoff, Peacock created a dedicated string of short videos for the show.
“We found that it actually drove longer watch time for ‘The Paper’ across all of our platforms,” he said. “What we’re really pleased about is not only fulfilling a really clear user need to, on-the-go, be able to easily catch up in a format that’s built for mobile, but [audiences] are also then being inspired to watch long form and watch more of the originals on Peacock.”
There are three categories of vertical videos the team develops. The first, like the aforementioned Can’t Miss Highlights and “The Paper” campaign, is designed to let viewers know what’s airing on Peacock and NBC right now. The second category allows fans to dive deeper into their favorite shows and movies. Peacock is experimenting heavily with that category this weekend by releasing exclusive footage and interviews from BravoCon, Bravo’s annual Los Vegas celebration of all things reality TV.
As for the third category, they’re part of an experiment Peacock is testing to see if vertical videos can live on their own. The platform’s short-form pop culture update show “The Rundown” is a prime example of that. Many of these vertical videos are also posted on platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts to help drive audience interest and engagement from viewers not currently inside the Peacock app.
“It really came about because we’ve been looking at behavioral trends, particularly among younger generations,” Jelley said. “A majority of their time is on mobile devices, so we wanted to make it easier for them to catch up, stay engaged on the go and have broader cultural conversation with all of our content.”
Looking ahead, Peacock is interested in taking another cue from social media: increased interactivity for users. The platform has already received an “incredible fan reaction” to Performance View, another Peacock offering for NBA fans that puts a visual overlay, showing stats and names, on live games. There’s also Peacock ScoreCard, a mix of Fantasy Basketball and Bingo that assigns viewers a name and tracks how accurate their game predictions are throughout the season. And in the middle of the season, Peacock will be launching Courtside Live, an option that lets viewers choose which cameras they want to focus on so they can create their own customized viewing experience. For example, if you only want to focus on a specific player during a game, a specialized player-tracking camera would allow you to do just that.
“We’re really interested in the interplay between interactivity with the user and how we can surface that as a core part of the experience,” Jelley said. “It’s an area we’re continuing to look at and experiment with, and you should expect us to see us experimenting with it over time.”
