Media & Entertainment

Peacock subscribers can now stream content on Meta Quest devices

Comment

Peacock on Meta Quest screen
Image Credits: Meta

At Meta Connect 2022, the tech giant announced a three-year partnership with NBCUniversal that would bring Peacock to the Meta Quest virtual reality headset. Today, the streaming app is now available on Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest Pro devices.

Subscribers can get Peacock in the Meta Store and stream 90,000 hours of movies and TV shows in VR, such as fan-favorites like “The Office,” “Parks and Recreation” and “Yellowstone,” as well as Peacock originals like “Poker Face” and “Bel-Air.”

Users can also watch live sporting events in VR, including Major League Baseball, Premier League soccer, WWE wrestling, Big Ten Football and NFL games, among others.

On Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest Pro, users can multitask by watching multiple screens at once. So, Peacock subscribers can watch content within the streaming app while also browsing the internet or using other apps.

Plus, users will soon get to interact with the Dunder Mifflin gang in virtual reality. Later this year, Meta is bringing NBCU IP to Meta Horizon Worlds and the Meta Avatars Store. NBCU IP coming to these immersive environments includes DreamWorks, Universal Monsters, Halloween Horror Nights, Blumhouse and more.

Peacock is also giving eligible customers limited-time offers.

Peacock subscribers who already own a Meta Quest 2 or Meta Quest Pro can get a Peacock Premium subscription at no additional cost for three months. Peacock customers who purchase a Meta Quest device will get a free one-year subscription to Peacock Premium.

Customers must be 18 years and older and either live in the United States or U.S. territories (Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands) to qualify for the offers.

The offer ends on April 11, 2024.

Meta partners with NBCUniversal to bring you into ‘The Office’

“We’re excited to bring the Peacock App to Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest Pro,” said Jarred Kennedy, VP, Immersive Apps and Experiences at Meta, in a statement. “With Meta Quest 2 and Pro, you can turn any room into your own virtual entertainment theater, and now users have access to an even larger collection of fan-favorite movies, TV, and sports.”

As the streamer struggles to keep up with its larger competitors Netflix and HBO Max, Peacock likely hopes the offer will bring more subscribers to the platform. In the fourth quarter of 2022, the streaming service gained five million paying subscribers, bringing the total to 20 million. However, the company also reported an adjusted EBITDA loss of $978 million.

Peacock has shifted away from its free offering, killing its free tier to new customers. Also, it no longer gives Xfinity customers free access to the Peacock Premium plan. Peacock will announce its Q1 2023 financial results on April 27.

Meta is likely also betting on the partnership for more revenue as it reported three quarterly revenue declines in a row. The most recent earnings report showed a 4% decrease in revenue year over year. In 2022, its virtual reality division lost $3.67 billion. Meta will report its first-quarter results on April 26.

In January, Meta announced it expanded its deal with the NBA to bring 52 live VR games to the Meta Quest headsets.

Meta expands its partnership with the NBA to offer 52 games in VR

 

More TechCrunch

Ever wonder why conversational AI like ChatGPT says “Sorry, I can’t do that” or some other polite refusal? OpenAI is offering a limited look at the reasoning behind its own…

OpenAI offers a peek behind the curtain of its AI’s secret instructions

The federal government agency responsible for granting patents and trademarks is alerting thousands of filers whose private addresses were exposed following a second data spill in as many years. The…

US Patent and Trademark Office confirms another leak of filers’ address data

As part of an investigation into people involved in the pro-independence movement in Catalonia, the Spanish police obtained information from the encrypted services Wire and Proton, which helped the authorities…

Encrypted services Apple, Proton and Wire helped Spanish police identify activist

Match Group, the company that owns several dating apps, including Tinder and Hinge, released its first-quarter earnings report on Tuesday, which shows that Tinder’s paying user base has decreased for…

Match looks to Hinge as Tinder fails

Private social networking is making a comeback. Gratitude Plus, a startup that aims to shift social media in a more positive direction, is expanding its wellness-focused, personal reflections journal to…

Gratitude Plus makes social networking positive, private and personal

With venture totals slipping year-over-year in key markets like the United States, and concern that venture firms themselves are struggling to raise more capital, founders might be worried. After all,…

Can AI help founders fundraise more quickly and easily?

Google has found a way to bring a variation of its clever “Circle to Search” gesture to iPhone users. The new interaction, launched in January, allows Android users to search…

Google brings a variation on ‘Circle to Search’ to iPhone users

A new sculpture going live on Wednesday in the Flatiron South Public Plaza in New York is not your typical artwork. It combines technology, sociology, anthropology and art to let…

Always-on video portal lets people in NYC and Dublin interact in real time

Apple’s iPad event had a lot to like. New iPads with new chips and new sizes, a new Apple Pencil, and even some software updates. If you are a big…

TechCrunch Minute: When did iPads get as expensive as MacBooks?

Autonomous, AI-based players are coming to a gaming experience near you, and a new startup, Altera, is joining the fray to build this new guard of AI agents. The company announced…

Bye-bye bots: Altera’s game-playing AI agents get backing from Eric Schmidt

Google DeepMind has taken the wraps off a new version AlphaFold, their transformative machine learning model that predicts the shape and behavior of proteins. AlphaFold 3 is not only more…

Google DeepMind debuts huge AlphaFold update and free proteomics-as-a-service web app

Uber plans to deliver more perks to Uber One members, like member-exclusive events, in a bid to gain more revenue through subscriptions.  “You will see more member-exclusives coming up where…

Uber promises member exclusives as Uber One passes $1B run-rate

We’ve all seen them. The inspector with a clipboard, walking around a building, ticking off the last time the fire extinguishers were checked, or if all the lights are working.…

Checkfirst raises $1.5M pre-seed to apply AI to remote inspections and audits

Close to a decade ago, brothers Aviv and Matteo Shapira co-founded a company, Replay, that created a video format for 360-degree replays — the sorts of replays that have become…

Controversial drone company Xtend leans into defense with new $40 million round

Usually, when something starts to rot, it gets pitched in the trash. But Joanne Rodriguez wants to turn the concept of rot on its head by growing fungus on trash…

Mycocycle uses mushrooms to upcycle old tires and construction waste

Monzo has raised another £150 million ($190 million), as the challenger bank looks to expand its presence internationally — particularly in the U.S. The new round comes just two months…

UK challenger bank Monzo nabs another $190M as US expansion beckons

iRobot has announced the successor to longtime CEO, Colin Angle. Gary Cohen, who previous held chief executive role at Timex and Qualitor Automotive, will be heading up the company, marking a major…

iRobot names former Timex head Gary Cohen as CEO

Reddit — now a publicly-traded company with more scrutiny on revenue growth — is putting a big focus on boosting its international audience, starting with francophones. In their first-ever earnings…

Reddit tests automatic, whole-site translation into French using LLM-based AI

Mushrooms continue to be a big area for alternative proteins. Canada-based Maia Farms recently raised $1.7 million to develop a blend of mushroom and plant-based protein using biomass fermentation. There’s…

Meati Foods bites into another $100M amid growth to 7,000 retail locations

Cleaning the outside of buildings is a dirty job, and it’s also dangerous. Lucid Bots came on the scene in 2018 with its Sherpa line of drones to clean windows…

Lucid Bots secures $9M for drones to clean more than your windows

High interest rates and financial pressures make it more important than ever for finance teams to have a better handle on their cash flow, and several startups are hoping to…

Israeli startup Panax raises a $10M Series A for its AI-driven cash flow management platform

The European Union has deepened the investigation of Elon Musk-owned social network, X, that it opened back in December under the bloc’s online governance and content moderation rulebook, the Digital Services Act…

EU grills Elon Musk’s X about content moderation and deepfake risks

For the founders of Atlan, a data governance startup, data has always been at the heart of what they do, even before they launched the company. In fact, co-founders Prukalpa…

Atlan scores $105M for its data control plane, as LLMs boost importance of data

It is estimated that about 2 billion people, especially those in lower and middle-income countries, lack access to quality and affordable essential medicines. The situation is exacerbated by low-quality or even killer…

Axmed raises $2M from Founderful to streamline drug supply chains in underserved markets

For decades, the Global Positioning System (GPS) has maintained a de facto monopoly on positioning, navigation and timing, because it’s cheap and already integrated into billions of devices around the…

Xona Space Systems closes $19M Series A to build out ultra-accurate GPS alternative

Bankruptcy lawyers representing customers impacted by the dramatic crash of cryptocurrency exchange FTX 17 months ago say that the vast majority of victims will receive their money back — plus interest. The…

FTX crypto fraud victims to get their money back — plus interest

Google on Wednesday launched its digital wallet in India with local integrations, nearly two years after the app was relaunched as a digital wallet platform in the U.S. As TechCrunch exclusively reported last month,…

Google Wallet is now available in India

Bluesky has launched a new product roadmap for the coming months. The decentralized social network said on Tuesday that it is planning to introduce direct messages, support for videos, improved…

Bluesky to add DMs, video support and in-app custom feed curation

Samsung Medison, a medical device unit of Samsung Electronics that specializes in developing diagnostic imaging devices, said on Wednesday it plans to acquire Sonio, a Paris-based startup that makes AI-powered software…

Samsung Medison to acquire French AI ultrasound startup Sonio for $92.7M

Kyle Kuzma is a lot of things. He’s a forward for the Washington Wizards NBA team and a 2020 NBA champion. He’s also a style icon — depending on who…

NBA champion Kyle Kuzma looks to bring his team mentality to Scrum Ventures