NBCU Chairman Frances Berwick and Her Strategy for Primetime and Platforms

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The classic image of the network scheduler plotting over a primetime grid Monday through Sunday competing with four or five networks rivals is over. “Now, it’s three dimensional chess,” said NBCUniversal Entertainment chairman Frances Berwick. “But the fundamental thing is that the individual platform and network brands, and the show IPs need to be really stay strong and relevant.”

For Berwick, the role of the commissioner and the scheduler has become one of franchise management.

The exec was in conversation with Variety co-editor-in-chief Cynthia Littleton at the 2024 NAB Show discussing the current TV landscape as well as connecting content and audiences across NBCU’s television portfolio.

America’s Got Talent and The Voice are still “gigantic hits” on broadcast, and NBCU knows that the majority of viewing is still with live.

“That’s a super important tentpole for any broadcast network, because the concept of scheduling isn’t dead. The concept of having a lead show and platform to launch a new show is very much a critical piece of the strategy,” she said.

“We need linear broadcast, it’s super important. We need our cable entertainment networks and our cable news networks and we need Peacock and the whole sort of comes together.”

Berwick continued, “We really lean into these tentpoles and we’re very focused on keeping them relevant and part of the cultural conversation. It’s about fandoms and how do we leverage the fandoms. We take that piece of the engagement very seriously.”

For instance, NBCU has seen the Bravocon fan convention grow from 10,000 people in 2019 to nearly triple to 27,000 people at last year’s event held in Las Vegas in November.

“We believe that we are successful because of our fans, whether that is an America’s Got Talent fan, or it’s a Law and Order or One Chicago fan, or a WWE fan. How do we engage them? How do we drive that fandom? And how do we get them to come back to the content and to watch our platforms? That’s really sort of the primary objective of this.”

Next up for the broadcasters is preparing to promote a season of shows celebrating the 50th season of Saturday Night Live.

Arguably no franchise management is bigger than the quadrennial juggernaut of the Summer Olympic Games, for which NBCU is the rights-holder. The company paid $7.65 billion to renew its broadcast rights deal through 2032, the largest deal in the world for the games.

“We’re ramping up the entertainment and some of the spontaneity with, people like Snoop Dogg who will be co-hosting. We have talent like Kelly Clarkson and Jimmy Fallon, who will be very much a part of it, and we’ll be covering every single medal event on Peacock with primetime coverage on NBC.”

New for this Olympics coverage is a feature called Discovery Multiview, “where you can watch four sports at one time, so you don’t miss anything,” she said.

Other features allow users to “choose your own adventure… you can follow an athlete and really go deep into particular sports.”

And obviously there’s the Paris of it all.

“This is the first Games that we’ve really sort of covered since the pandemic with both Tokyo and Beijing being a little limited in what we could do. I think Paris is going to be epic,” Berwick said.

“Increasingly, we have to be much more patient when we judge shows, because often you don’t necessarily see the results from the live same numbers [compared to streaming platforms].It is almost never an apples to apples comparison.

“We do have to get more patient to see that long tail because the numbers are really sort of staggeringly high after a week or a month. We often can’t really see how successful a show is, for a really long period of time,” she continued.

“And I know you guys constantly want to give us all grades after a day and say, Oh, look how big that show is, or look how small that show is.”

Ironically, with greater personalized content feeds it can often take longer for shows to break through, she said. That’s because people are fed the same sort of content and not necessarily exposed to new content outside their bubble.

“You have to start hearing word of mouth or you have to start reading about it or hearing about it from other places than your own sort of recommendations and personalization.”

Berwick and Littleton were joined by America’s Got Talent host Terry Crews, who is also going to be presenting around the Olympics. “Hosting AGT is like a live sport because you don’t know where the ball is gonna bounce,” he said.

“Anything can happen. I would love to do more with NBC Sports. I see myself working with athletes and just doing live commentating or different things. So I’m keeping all that open.”