Fans of The Office will be happy learn that Peacock is free and offers all nine seasons of the NBC sitcom at no cost. Peacock launched in July 2020 as a streaming service for NBCUniversal shows such as The Office, This Is Us and the Real Housewives franchise.
For those who don’t know, NBCUniversal is the home of many networks, including NBC, NBC News, NBC Sports, Bravo, E! and Oxygen. The launch of Peacock came after fan-favorite shows such as The Office and Parks and Recreation, both of which originally aired on NBC, left rival streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime to stream under Peacock. As of January 2021, Peacock has had 33 million subscribers, and that number is only expected to grow.
With shows like The Office, This Is Us and the Real Housewives in its library, it’s clear that Peacock is a must-have streaming service for any TV fan. But with how saturated the market is at the moment with other streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Disney±—the list goes on), it’s understandable why TV lovers want to know if there’s a way to watch Peacock for free without the commitment of a subscription. Well, ahead is a breakdown on how to watch Peacock for free and binge your favorite NBCUniversal shows.
What are Peacock’s current deals?
Read on for a list of Peacock’s current deals.
For Peacock’s Black Friday 2022 deal, users can subscribe to the service’s ad-supported Premium plan for 99 cents per month for 12 months with the code SAVEBIG at checkout. The deal—which starts on November 23, 2022, and ends on November 28, 2022—saves subscribers more than 80 percent (or $4 per month/$48 in total) from Peacock Premium’s regular price of $4.99 per month. The deal is available for new and returning subscribers. Read on for step-by-step instructions for how to sign up for Peacock’s Black Friday 2022 deal.
- Visit Peacock’s Black Friday 2022 deal page
- Click “Redeem Now”
- Enter your information and payment method
- Start watching with Peacock’s Black Friday deal.
- Tip: Users can also subscribe from Peacock’s main website by clicking “Pick a Plan,” selecting the Premium plan and entering the code SAVEBIG in the “Have a promo code? section at checkout
Image: Christopher Del Sordo/NBC.
Is Peacock free?
Yes! Peacock is free. Viewers can watch thousands of hours of TV shows and movies, as well as sports and news, at no cost. (That includes The Office!) All you have to do is sign up for a free account with your email. That said, while Peacock offers a free plan, that doesn’t mean that everything on Peacock is available at no cost.
How much does Peacock cost?
Peacock offers two paid plans. Peacock Premium and Peacock Premium Plus. Peacock Premium costs $4.99 per month and Peacock Premium Plus costs $9.99 per month. Peacock Premium allows subscribers to access everything in the free plan, as well as live sports, Peacock original series, next-day episodes of NBC shows and more movies and TV shows that aren’t available in the free account. Peacock Premium Plus is the exact same as Peacock Premium except subscribers won’t have to watch ads and can stream their shows offline on their mobile devices.
Unfortunately, Peacock Premium and Peacock Premium Plus do not have free trials. However, there are a couple ways to still receive a free Peacock Premium subscription.
If you want to watch Peacock for free, there is a way, but you’ll need to be an Xfinity subscriber or know someone who is. Customers who have Xfinity Flex, Xfinity X1, Xfinity Internet or Xfinity Digital Starter TV accounts can receive a Peacock Premium subscription for free. Yes, free. Peacock has a guide for how to connect your Xfinity and Peacock accounts, but we also listed the steps below
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- Visit Peacock.com
- Create an account
- Link your Xfinity account
- Start watching Peacock Premium
Another way to watch Peacock for free is to be a Cox subscriber or know someone who is. Cox customers with an Essential internet plan or a higher video package can receive a free subscription to Peacock Premium. Customers with Cox’s Contour Stream Player or Starter Video plans also have access to free Peacock Premium. See step-by-step instructions for how to watch Peacock for free with Cox’s free Peacock Premium subscription below.
- Visit Peacock.com
- Create an account
- Link your Cox account
- Start watching Peacock Premium
Image: Peacock.
What’s on Peacock?
Peacock offers thousands of hours of TV shows and movies. Of course, The Office was the main draw for many Peacock subscribers. But the service also offers access to shows like Yellowstone, This Is Us, the Real Housewives and Keeping Up With the Kardashians.
Peacock has dozens of original TV shows on Peacock Premium and Peacock Premium Plus, including The Real Housewives of Miami, The Real Housewives: Ultimate Girls Trip, Bel-Air, One of Us Is Lying and the Saved by the Bell reboot. Peacock Premium also offers new movies like Marry Me, Halloween Kills and Boss Baby 2 that are released on Peacock at the same time as their theatrical premieres.
In an interview with The Wrap in 2019, NBCUniversal’s CEO Steve Burke explained how Peacock is different than streaming services like Netflix .“We’re not doing the same strategy that Netflix and people chasing Netflix have adopted,” he said at the time. He noted that what made Peacock different than other streaming services was its free, ad-supported plan that made it more affordable than other subscription-based services. “I think we’re gonna get to cruising altitude much more quickly than a subscription service,” he said.
Is Peacock worth It?
Is Peacock worth it? In an interview with Vulture in 2022, Peacock’s president, Kelly Campbell, opened up about what it was like to launch Peacock amid the current health crisis in 2020. “I actually think Peacock took a really strong approach when it came to entering the market with original content, especially given all the headwinds with COVID,” she said. “Peacock launched more than 70 originals in the first year and a half. We are looking to launch another 50 to 60 this year. We might not see the volume that we saw immediately at launch, but we are really focused and have learned a lot in that time. We’ve got a couple years of first-party data now, and so we’re in a really good position to make smart content decisions when it comes to originals and to take big swings. That’s exactly what we’re doing in partnership with our development team and studios.”
She also told the site about how Peacock is different than other streaming services, with original content like Marry Me and Bel-Air and and exclusive streaming events like the Olympics and the Super Bowl. “Record breaking in every way. It’s hard to find the right words to express just how big February [2022] has been for us. Peacock broke records on every front, from new subscribers and usage to concurrent streams and more in just one month, and really that long weekend you referenced,” she said. “We launched the most-streamed Olympics, the most-streamed Super Bowl. We had the most-streamed film launch with Marry Me. It is trending quickly to become the most-streamed film of all time on Peacock. We launched our most-streamed original series, Bel-Air, which is already the third-most-streamed title on the platform of all time and trending very quickly to become our top series — and that’s with only five episodes out there. So we can only imagine just how high that can go.”
Campbell also referenced Yellowstone and The Office as two of Peacock’s most streamed shows, as well as Bel-Air, a Peacock original and a reboot of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. “Yellowstone and The Office are incredibly successful on Peacock,” she said. “But think about how many hours of content are available for those titles, and that with Bel-Air we only have five episodes available so far. So to already be in that space with titles like that is pretty incredible. And relative to other originals, I would say Bel-Air is on an entirely new trajectory.”
Campbell also told Vulture about Peacock’s plan at the time to be NBC Universal’s exclusive streaming service for shows like Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Saturday Night Live, which have also been previously available to stream on competitors like Hulu. “I can’t speak to the specifics, but Peacock will become the exclusive streaming home of NBC current-season content later this year. We do think it’s a big deal. We see this as an opportunity to lean into that broader strategy — bringing the best content in the market to consumers, including the best of NBCU’s portfolio content,” she said. “In bringing that content home to Peacock, it also gives us a lot of opportunities to think about windowing, and how we program across our entire portfolio. Shows like La Brea, Saturday Night Live, Law & Order: SVU — these are among the most-watched current series on Peacock. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is another example. That became the most-watched NBC telecast of [2021] and the No. 2 live event in Peacock history at that time, behind only WrestleMania. We’re also experimenting with windowing. With [Bravo’s] Below Deck Mediterranean, we launched episodes one week early on Peacock, and that was able to really grow that audience.”
Campbell also spoke about Peacock’s free plan, which she considered a “smart move” that differentiates the service from its competitors. “I don’t think it was a mistake. I think it was a smart move. I think the free and bundled approach played a really critical part in scaling Peacock,” she said. “The free tier served a couple of purposes. First of all, it opened up the funnel. A very large portion of the total addressable market has signed up for and engaged with Peacock in some way since the launch. We were also able to replicate the model in Europe with Sky and put Peacock in front of consumers outside of the U.S. earlier than planned beginning last November. So the free tier to date has been an incredibly effective platform for customers to sign up, explore, and just enter the Peacock ecosystem.”
She continued, “That being said, consumers are voting with their time and with their wallets, and they’re spending more time on our paid and bundled tiers, and increasingly they’re choosing to sign up for our paid and bundled tiers. Those who pay us directly, in fact, make up the largest and fastest growing portion of our active accounts. We shared recently in our earnings that we have more than 9 million paid subscribers and more than 7 million bundled subscribers out of 25 million monthly active users. Our paid and bundled consumers make up about 75 percent of total viewership on the service, and that’s growing as well. We got to this point of being able to focus more on building our dual-revenue paid business model a lot more quickly than planned.”
Campbell, who used to work at Hulu, also spoke of Peacock’s business plan and how it may look different than other streaming services. “I think when Peacock entered the market, there was a realization that it wasn’t just about disruption or being the first to market or being the first to scale. It’s really about having the right content and building a quality relationship with consumers,” she said. “You’re not going to hear us talking about these big numbers and providing no clarity on what’s within them. We’re really focused on building a long-term, sustainable business. We’re in the long game. It’s not just about scale. It’s about scaling while building a quality relationship with consumers. I think that’s a different lens than perhaps other streamers, especially at other points in time, may have looked at the market through. I think Peacock is really going to be focused on that idea of creating value, building a sustainable business. We’re focused on the long game.”
To continue to grow Peacock, Campbell also understands how important original films like Marry Me and Halloween Kills are to the service. “We’re very invested in film. We believe film is incredibly valuable to streaming audiences. But just to back up a little bit and put it into context, we look at film as a category overall. We do that very much in partnership with Donna Langley and the Universal Pictures team more broadly,” she said. “When we look at the Peacock film strategy, we look at it through a few different lenses. We look at it through the pay-one deal, which is structured to bring films that launch in theaters to Peacock audiences more quickly than they would have come in the past. We are also still opportunistically bringing films from Universal to Peacock day-and-date. We are investing in film from a licensed and library perspective, both looking very closely at our catalog within the NBCU ecosystem and at third-party opportunities, such as Harry Potter. And, of course, original film is an opportunity for Peacock, and we are planning to make investments there in partnership with Donna and the Universal team.”
Sign up for Peacock’s free plan at Peacock.com.
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