NEW YORK, NY – FEBRUARY 23: Zuby Ejiofor #24 of the St. John's Red Storm shoots the ball in the … [+]
On Thursday at noon, the St. John’s men’s basketball team will play in the quarterfinals of the Big East tournament. A sold-out Madison Square Garden crowd will be rooting for the No. 1 seed Red Storm, the hometown team that’s No. 6 in the Associated Press poll. But fans who won’t be there in person will have to watch the game via Peacock, NBC’s streaming service that costs $7.99 or $13.99 per month depending on the plan.
Peacock will also air the Big East’s three first round games on Wednesday and the Marquette-Xavier quarterfinal on Thursday afternoon. The Big Ten tournament’s three first round games on Wednesday will be on Peacock, too.
While the Big Ten had tournament games on Peacock last year, this is the first time the Big East will have tournament games on the streaming service. Since 2013, the Big East has had a media rights deal with Fox Sports, so all of the Big East tournament games since then have aired on Fox or FS1.
The Big East struck a six-year deal last summer with Fox Sports, NBC Sports and TNT Sports that begins with the 2025-26 school year. However, NBC signed a sub-licensing agreement with Fox just for this year to air 23 regular season Big East games and the first five tournament games exclusively on Peacock. Two other regular season games aired simultaneously on NBC and Peacock. The two Thursday night Big East tournament quarterfinals will air on FS1, while Friday night’s semifinals and Saturday night’s final will be on Fox.
Each of the Big East’s 11 teams had at least three regular season games on Peacock, so diehard fans are likely aware of the platform. Still, the tournament games often draw more casual fans who may not know about Peacock or do not want to pay extra money to watch.
“This was an important deal point for NBC to be able to have programming at that level as part of their package given the financial investment they were willing to make to the Big East,” Big East commissioner Val Ackerman said. “It’ll be an adjustment for some of our fans. But at the end of the day, this seemed to be the direction the world was going as you look around and see what other premium programming is ending up on a digital platform. We were made comfortable with that arrangement.”
Since launching Peacock in the summer of 2020, NBC has made sports a signature selling point for the streaming service alongside its slate of television shows and movies. Peacock debuted with a slate of Premier League soccer games and has featured NFL games, too, as well as the Summer Olympics, including last year when almost all of the events were streamed live.
Michael Cavanagh, president of NBC parent company Comcast Corp., said during the company’s earnings call in January that Peacock had 36 million subscribers. Still, the service had an adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) loss of $372 million in the fourth quarter of 2024, which was actually an improvement of an $825 million adjusted EBITDA loss in the fourth quarter of 2023.
Despite the losses, Comcast is investing heavily in sports, including signing an 11-year deal with the NBA and WNBA that begins next season and will see games air on Peacock.
“(Peacock) is a massive priority for us across Comcast and NBC Universal,” said Matt Grassie, director of programming and rights management at NBC Sports. “We’ve reached a landscape even with the conferences and the leagues, it's an important ecosystem to exist in now on the streaming side. There are just so many benefits to the way that we can program on the platform and the way that we can target viewers to ramp up engagement to as high a clip as possible. Those are all things that you can do in a streaming environment and on a direct-to-consumer platform that is difficult to do on cable or broadcast.”
This season, NBC aired more than 150 men’s and women’s college basketball games from the Big Ten, Big East and Atlantic 10, including more than 120 exclusively on Peacock. The company plans on increasing that total in the coming years, as it looks to use sports as a way to drive subscriptions.
“(College basketball) really dovetails with the idea of the more time spent on the platform, sports fans in general are introduced to all the of the rest of the programming that’s on, which we think is a great benefit,” Grassie said.
The Big Ten’s media rights deal with NBC, CBS and Fox began with the 2023-24 school year and runs through the 2029-30 school year. As part of the agreement, the league has a football game air simultaneously on NBC and Peacock each Saturday night during the season, while eight other games each season are Peacock exclusives. Peacock also broadcasts the first round games in the Big Ten men’s and women’s basketball tournaments.
“(The NBC deal) gave us an opportunity to tap into a lot of different demographics, from different age ranges, different backgrounds, and just different types of fans and viewers that want to watch our content throughout the year,” Big Ten chief operating officer Kerry Kenny said. “We felt like that was a good combination to start to see how that worked, and in the sports of football and men’s and women’s basketball to be a part of our overall rights portfolio until the end of the decade.”
As with the Big Ten, Peacock is part of a larger deal for the Big East. The league had signed an agreement with Fox Sports 12 years ago at the same time that it was formed following the dissolution of the old Big East, which had formed in 1979. The schools that played major college football split into the American Athletic Conference, while the seven remaining schools without top-level football kept the Big East name. The Fox deal provided a financial cushion for the new Big East, and it served Fox well because the network was about to launch FS1, its sports cable channel.
As the Big East negotiated its new media rights deal last year, the landscape was much different, with the reach of cable channels dwindling and the streaming options becoming more abundant. The league decided to split its rights into three, with Fox remaining as the main partner but with NBC Sports and TNT Sports also getting some games. The deal includes games on Fox, FS1, FS2, NBC, Peacock, TNT, TBS, truTV and the Max streaming service.
Ackerman said the Big East saw a 30% increase in the average annual value of its media rights deal compared with the previous Fox agreement. Beginning next season, Fox Sports will have at least 80 Big East men’s and women’s basketball games per season, including the men’s tournament championship airing each season on the broadcast network. NBC and Peacock will have more than 60 men’s and women’s basketball games per season, including tournament games, while TNT Sports will have more than 65 regular season games. Ackerman said the three media companies will increase their Big East shoulder programming and provide more coverage of women’s basketball, which was a league priority.
The Big East is also in the process of finalizing a secondary media rights package that includes some women’s basketball games, Olympic sports games and a “handful” of early season men’s basketball games that weren’t part of the main package, according to Ackerman. She expects the deal will be finalized in the coming months and likely include a streaming component.
“We were very satisfied with the term, with the financial provisions, with the promises of promotion by our various partners (in the primary deal struck last summer),” Ackerman said. “We’re going to be on a lot of different places, so we’ll have to be aggressive in terms of promoting where we are on any given night. We expect our networks to be good partners there in cross-promoting so our fans know where to find us.”
