NBCUniversal knows what it’s got with a talent like Kenan Thompson, so no wonder it would make him a spokesperson for the company and one of the faces of its Olympic coverage. At a Peacock programming preview attended by The A.V. Club on Thursday, Thompson opened the event by teasing the celebrities that will be involved in the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics, including Kelly Clarkson, Jimmy Fallon, Alex Cooper of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, and Kevin Hart and Thompson himself, who will be hosting an Olympic Highlights show together for Peacock. While neither of them has the expertise of the games’ regular commentators, “I’ve been a fan of the Olympics all my life. I’ve been learning about the games to prepare, and I learned that this year’s opening ceremonies… are not in a stadium,” Thompson told the crowd. “Instead the athletes will be on boats coming up the River Seine. That’s right. Hundreds of boats carrying thousands of athletes all in one place. Nothing could go wrong.”
Celebrities aren’t the only shiny new feature to NBC’s Olympics coverage. The network announced a new “first of its kind” feature called “Your Daily Olympic Recap,” powered by generative A.I. This will create personalized playlists for users “featuring highlights all the events they care about most from the previous day,” John Jelley (Senior Vice President, Product & UX) explained. “So each compilation will feature clips from our Olympic coverage, thousands of hours of it, being narrated by a high-quality A.I. recreation” of sportscaster Al Michaels’ voice, “which was trained with his permission on his past NBC appearances and matches his signature style and expertise.” Apparently, a team of NBC Sports editors will review “all the content, including audio and clips, for quality validation as well as accuracy” before it becomes available, and then the “whole experience is personalized one-to-one for each user.”
How a team of editors can possibly review content that has “almost 7 million possible variants” is unclear; also unclear is how much energy this ambitious endeavor is sucking up. (We would bet a whole lot.) But it’s all part of Peacock’s commitment to giving users a comprehensive experience in which they can consume as much of the Olympics as possible, with other features like multiview allowing fans to watch multiple different events simultaneously. Becoming the “destination” for the Olympics was already a major opportunity to draw eyes to Peacock. Adding innovative features to the viewing experience is a way to further justify the streaming experience over traditional television. Peacock—and most of the non-Netflix streamers—could really use the boost. Generative A.I. doesn’t seem to have solved anybody’s problems so far, but maybe Peacock will be the platform that finally utilizes it right. Maybe.