Fans of popular sports have been forced to get multiple streaming subscriptions if they want to watch their favorite team play all of its games. But fans of less traditional sports are benefiting from the growth of streaming services.
Peacock is a streaming service owned by NBC. They offer coverage of some of the most popular sports, including the NFL for Sunday Night Football, MLB, college basketball, Premier League soccer, and the USL Super League for soccer.
But Peacock has decided over the past few years to also cover less popular sports that have a history of not being covered on cable television.
Peacock covers a lot of motorsports, for instance. Peacock streams the entire SuperMotocross World Championship, IndyCar, and International Motor Sports Association SportsCar championship seasons. They have coverage of select Nitro Rallycross, Moto Grand Prix, and NASCAR races. They also cover the entire two weeks of the Dakar Rally each year.
The SuperMotocross series has had a major benefit from being picked up by Peacock. All 31 rounds of the season began streaming on Peacock in 2023.
The sport has 502,000 average viewers per race. That is a 26 percent growth compared to the 2023 season. There were more than 1.9 billion minutes streamed from the entire season, and this a 24 percent growth from 2023.
They had over 1 million active viewers during the Washougal Pro Motocross race on July 20, and this was the largest number of active viewers since 2021.
Peacock also offers live coverage of swimming, tennis, cycling, rugby, track and field, horse racing, speed skating, skiing, snowboarding, and golf events.
Previously, it was unlikely that swimming fans could watch a swimming event on cable television. But now with Peacock, fans can see multiple swimming events, such as the Toyota U.S. Open, TYR Pro Swim series, and the World Aquatics Swimming World Cup.
This leads to the question of how much these lesser-known sports will grow because of Peacock’s coverage. The numbers that have been provided are promising, and only time will tell with these smaller sports will grow into more well-known sports.
