At Raw Materials, I worked on several projects for Peacock. Many of them were what I'd call big picture strategy and ideation work—inspirational ideas for evolving a product that had already shipped. What could be added to the roadmap? What might inspire the next phase of development?
One of the most notable projects explored an idea that nearly every TV company had tried: the phone as a second screen. About 80% of people watching TV have a phone in their hands. Could we get them engaged in both places at once? Could the phone enhance the viewing experience?
The honest answer, which we discovered along with everyone else in the industry, is not really. Honestly, the best second screen app is probably Twitter or Bluesky. People want to talk about what they're watching, not dive into stats or interactive features. We did show compelling use cases, for instance, diving deep on stats around a particular player while they're playing. But the technology to seamlessly implement these features isn’t quite there yet…
Despite these conclusions, the most immediately valuable work we did was transforming Peacock from a standard streaming product into a white label platform, which means that other content providers could use the Peacock system with their branding and content. The idea was that other cable providers and content providers could use Peacock's design system and technology, brand it as their own, and deliver it to their customers. Instead of building their own streaming platforms from scratch, they could license what Peacock had already built.
This was really an engineering and systems design challenge. We had an existing design system that worked well for Peacock, but how do we spec it out so it's flexible enough for other brands? What goes where? How do we give content providers clear rules and good onboarding options when they're setting up their own versions? It needed to be comprehensive enough to maintain quality across different implementations, but flexible enough that each provider could make it feel like their own product.
We developed documentation, guidelines, and customization frameworks that will let other companies plug in their branding, their content, their business rules, while maintaining the core functionality and user experience that made Peacock work. It required thinking about the product not just as a destination, but as infrastructure.
The work paid off. That white label product is currently being used by some European cable providers. They're running streaming services built on Peacock's technology, but you'd never know it unless you looked under the hood. That was exactly the point—the platform should be invisible, letting each provider's brand and content take center stage.
It was a reminder that sometimes the most valuable thing you can build isn't the product itself, but evolve and iterate the system that lets others build their own versions. Peacock as a consumer product was one thing. Peacock as a platform that could power multiple streaming services was something else entirely. That transformation—from product to platform—was some of the most interesting work I did there.