Since its inception in the spring of 2020, Comcast’s streaming service Peacock has been offered with several tiers. Anyone can sign up and watch some of Peacock’s programming for free with commercial interruptions. To get rid of the commercials, you had to upgrade to a paid plan. The $5 a month “Peacock Premium” got you access to all of Peacock’s programming, including originals and every episode of The Office. (Only seasons 1 and 2 of The Office were available for free.)Then if you wanted to watch Peacock without ads, that was $10 a month on the “Peacock Premium Plus” tier.
At launch the Premium plan was also offered as a perk to Comcast’s Xfinity cable subscribers free of charge. Or Xfinity subscribers could upgrade to the Premium Plus plan for $5 a month instead of the usual $10. For folks who hadn’t cut the cord, it was a nice added benefit of their cable plans.
Well, you know what they say about all good things coming to an end. A Peacock spokesman confirmed to The Streamable that the service will stop offering free Peacock Premium to new Xfinity subscribers starting in April. And for those who are already getting Peacock Premium for free as part of their Xfinity subscription “will have to start paying for the streaming service on June 26.”
Peacock remains relatively reasonable by the price of most streaming services — Disney+ is $7.99 a month with ads or $10.99 without, while the most basic Netflix plan with ads is $6.99 a month and $9.99 for ad-free. But those streamers have much larger subscriber bases already. We’ll see how many of these “free” subscribers decide to convert to a paid subscription once they’re forced to choose.
