Peacock Drops the Download Button From Its Mobile Nav, Adds a Vertical Video Tab

“Public Eye,” the generative-AI hidden object game launched Aug 10, is the last item on a roadmap disclosed in March… Andy Cohen’s AI avatar hosts a personalized feed, and live NBA broadcasts are cropped to 9:16 in real time

NBCUniversal’s streaming service Peacock launched “Public Eye” on August 10 as a game that runs directly inside its mobile app. The company’s label for it is a “cinematic hidden object detective game.” It runs 10 serialized episodes, with scene visuals produced by Wolf Games’ generative AI engine.

The title is the last entry on a slate announced March 13. That day Peacock previewed Your Bravoverse, a personalized vertical video feed hosted by Andy Cohen’s generative-AI avatar; real-time cropping of live NBA broadcasts into 9:16; two Wolf Games titles; and a Jeopardy! mini-game. One more item changed the app’s structure: the download button leaves the bottom navigation and a dedicated vertical video space takes its slot.

Peacock posted USD 189 million (about KRW 266.5 billion) in adjusted EBITDA in Q2 2026, its first profitable quarter, adding 2 million subscribers to reach 48 million. The drivers were the NBA playoffs, the FIFA World Cup and “Love Island USA.” Holding those users inside the app is the remaining problem, and the features rolled out from March through August target it.

Download Button Out of the Bottom Nav, Vertical Video Tab In

The five slots in a bottom navigation bar are the compressed statement of what a service tells users to do. Peacock is replacing the download slot with a vertical video feed; downloading itself moves into user profiles.

Peacock introduced vertical clips across all genres in early 2025, a first among streaming platforms. The company says the feature has since driven higher mobile frequency and more watch sessions, with clips working as a discovery engine. The behavior observed in clips is being promoted into the app’s structure, with the personalized feed, live vertical broadcasts and games stacked on top.

Spring and summer features previewed March 13: Your Bravoverse, vertical live NBA, Law & Order: Clue Hunter, mini-games on the app home. (Source: NBCUniversal)

“Public Eye” Runs 10 Episodes; Clear the List and the Next Area Opens

Players take the role of Officer Logan Dine, a patrol cop quietly investigating his uncle’s murder in the fictional Caldera City, where the case opens onto a conspiracy running through the entire police department. Each episode pairs narrative with puzzle play as users comb animated scenes for clues.

Gameplay screens for “Public Eye”: vertical framing, search list, point accrual, area unlocks. (Source: NBCUniversal)

In the released screens a search list — business card, shell casings, crumpled paper — sits at the bottom of the frame and fills in thirds. Every find scores 100 points; completing the list triggers an “AREA UNLOCKED” card that opens the next scene, while locked chapters stay padlocked in the thumbnail strip. The vertical frame, episode locks and forward-pulling cut points match the structure microdrama apps use.

John Jelley, NBCUniversal Media Group’s senior vice president of product UX and design, said the title sits at the intersection of two trends audiences are drawn to — “microdramas and interactive storytelling.” Wolf Games co-founder Elliot Wolf said players are spotting clues and meeting characters within seconds, calling it “as easy to pick up as your morning puzzle.”

A Genre Bound by Art Cost — Generative AI Replaces Its Biggest Line Item

Hidden object is art-intensive: dozens of items have to be illustrated into every scene, and adding episodes means drawing that many more backgrounds. Wooga’s June’s Journey, Playrix’s Manor Matters and G5 Entertainment’s Sherlock: Hidden Object Mystery have run for years and proven the genre’s profitability, yet new entrants have been rare. Generative AI makes the genre’s most expensive line item its cheapest. “Law & Order: Clue Hunter,” which shipped in spring, sits in the same genre — players find hidden objects to identify suspects.

The audience overlaps as well. Hidden object play skews toward women and players 45 and older, matching the viewership “Law & Order” and “Chicago” have held for three decades. Growth Market Reports sizes the global market at USD 4.2 billion (about KRW 5.92 trillion) in 2024, projecting USD 8.1 billion by 2033.

Wolf Games closed a USD 9 million (about KRW 12.7 billion) Series A led by Main Street Advisors on October 22, 2025, announcing the NBCUniversal partnership the same day. Dick Wolf, Jimmy Iovine and Paul Wachter reinvested; Maverick Carter and Tom Werner joined. The founders are Elliot Wolf (chief creative officer), Andrew Adashek (CEO) and Noah Rosenberg (CTO). The company runs its own generative AI game engine and made “ethical” generative AI a condition of the deal. At seed stage in early 2025 it raised USD 4 million and said it used generative AI, including Google Gemini, for storylines, interview clips and stills.

5,000 Hours of Bravo, an AI Avatar Host, 600 Billion Viewing Variants

The largest item on the roadmap is Your Bravoverse. It slices more than 5,000 hours of Bravo archive into clips and assembles an endless vertical playlist around the shows and moments a user selects, guided by a generative-AI avatar of “Watch What Happens Live” host Andy Cohen. The avatar was built with Synthesia’s technology, trained exclusively on footage of Cohen captured in Synthesia’s studio.

AI runs through every production stage: cutting clips from the catalog, extracting story units with computer vision, and running AI agents trained on what Bravo fans respond to in order to weave storylines across seasons and franchises. Once a user sets initial preferences, the company says possible viewing variants exceed 600 billion. NBCUniversal editors validate the output for quality and accuracy.

Matt Strauss, chairman of NBCUniversal Media Group, described it as the first pairing of NBCU content with agentic and generative AI to build a personalized experience at scale. Cohen said everything is guided by him — “not exactly me, but a version of me.”

An advertising product came with it: NBCUniversal is offering brands interactive moments in which Cohen’s avatar references them inside the experience.

The target was chosen on fandom metrics. Bravo viewers consume more content than any other cohort on Peacock, watching up to seven shows a week and averaging 24 hours a month, with the most engaged watching up to 75 episodes. Since 2024, returning Bravo series are up an average 41% season over season on Peacock, and accounts acquired for Bravo watch 92% more non-Bravo hours than the Peacock norm. BravoCon 2025 reached more than 3 million accounts, up 461% from 2023. Peacock picked not its largest catalog but its tightest audience.

Live NBA Cropped to 9:16 in Real Time; 20% Converted From Olympic Highlights

Peacock uses AI to crop the NBC Sports-produced live broadcast into a 9:16 vertical stream in real time, launching in beta for NBA games. The company calls it the first time an entertainment app has offered full live broadcasts in 9:16. The feature sits inside Courtside Live, which debuted at the 2026 NBA All-Star Game and lets fans move between multiple camera angles and the main broadcast.

Figures on vertical as a funnel arrived with it. At the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, 20% of viewers tapped from a highlight clip into the live event, and mobile users were twice as likely to use Multiview as fans watching on TV.

Table 1. Peacock mobile app redesign roadmap

40% of Mobile Users Played a Game in June; the Company Calls It a Discovery Engine

In June, 40% of Peacock mobile users engaged with a game in the app, according to the August release. “Law & Order: Clue Hunter” players spent an average of more than six minutes a day in the game, which Peacock called one of its most successful game launches to date.

The company labels games a “discovery engine,” noting that players of “Wheel of Fortune TODAY” are becoming first-time viewers of the show. The phrase it attached to vertical clips in March, it attached to games in August.

Comcast has announced it will spin NBCUniversal and Sky into a separately traded company. A standalone Peacock will have to prove growth on its own metrics — time per subscriber and churn.

Netflix Picked the Living-Room TV; Peacock Picked Mobile Vertical

Netflix is moving the other way. Co-CEO Greg Peters reaffirmed a cloud-first strategy in January 2026, putting TV-screen games at the center. Party titles such as Boggle, Pictionary and LEGO Party! lifted engagement after the party pack launch, though reach stands at roughly 10% of eligible members; Jackbox Party Essentials followed in April. Peters sized the games market at roughly USD 140 billion excluding China while framing games as an engagement and retention tool rather than a revenue line.

Table 2. In-app game strategy: Peacock vs Netflix

Short Drama Is a USD 12 Billion Market; Korea Ranks Fourth by Monthly Revenue

NBCUniversal put “microdrama-style storytelling” in the subhead of its August release. Media Partners Asia sizes the global short-drama market at USD 5 billion in 2023 and USD 12 billion in 2025, projecting USD 26 billion by 2030. Sensor Tower reports DramaBox and ReelShort each generated about USD 140 million in in-app purchase revenue in Q1 2026, with six short-drama apps entering the global top 40 by downloads; time spent in the category has risen roughly sixfold year over year.

Korea (한국) ranks fourth worldwide by monthly revenue share after the United States, Japan and the United Kingdom. The domestic app Vigloo (비글루) hit its own high of third place in Korea by monthly revenue in January 2026, joined by Shortcha (숏챠) and Lezhin Entertainment (레진엔터테인먼트). TikTok has launched PineDrama, a dedicated short-drama app, in the U.S. and Brazil.

Table 3. Key figures

Games Gain 10% in Net Interest; 75% Oppose Replacing Actors

In Luminate Intelligence’s July 2026 report “AI & Media: Audience Attitudes,” games were the only category where knowing AI was involved raised net stated interest, up 10%, while film and TV scripts fell 13% and music fell 16%. In the same research, 75% opposed replacing actors with AI and 93% said AI use in film and television should be disclosed.

Peacock’s roadmap tests that line at several points at once. Background art in a game sits inside the permitted column; replicating a host’s face and voice as an avatar does not. Cohen’s avatar was built with his participation from studio-captured source and human editors validate the output, but the moment it names an advertiser’s brand, another labeling layer is required. Whether a free-to-play title with in-app purchases can cover generative compute costs has been a question since the seed round.

What This Means for Korean Operators (한국 사업자에 주는 메시지)

The first thing to study is neither the game nor the avatar — it is the navigation bar. Peacock changed one of five slots. Treating vertical video or games as one more row inside the home screen will not produce anything like the 40% figure. The decision that matters is not what to add but what to remove from that position.

Format should be chosen from cost, not from IP. Peacock picked hidden object because the genre was bound by art cost and generative AI unties that knot. The question is not “what game can we make from our IP” but “which format does generative AI make dramatically cheaper, and does that format’s audience overlap with our viewers?” Visual novels, mystery and courtroom adventures, and object-search titles sit in that intersection.

A personalized feed starts from fandom density, not library size. Peacock’s first target was not its largest catalog but its tightest audience. In Korea, long-running variety franchises and reality or audition properties — libraries whose viewers behave like a community — are the equivalent first candidates.

The measurement frame needs rebuilding. In the “Wheel of Fortune TODAY” and Olympics cases, the meaningful number is not how many engaged but what share moved from that touchpoint into the programming. If clips or games are designed as an acquisition path, the KPI is conversion into the main title, not views — and it is readily measurable, because both behaviors happen inside one app.

Using an avatar requires settling, at the contract stage, the scope of captured source, the limits of training data, and how far commercial speech may go. Peacock built Cohen’s avatar only from footage shot with him in-studio and kept human editors in the validation loop. Note also that the roadmap was fronted by the media group chairman and the product UX and design organization, not the content division.

Sources

NBCUniversal newsroom, “NBCUniversal Super-Serves Fans With AI-Driven Entertainment Features on the Peacock Mobile App,” Mar 13, 2026 — https://www.nbcuniversal.com/article/nbcuniversal-super-serves-fans-ai-driven-entertainment-features-peacock-mobile-app

NBCUniversal newsroom, “New Interactive Game ‘Public Eye’ From Wolf Games Now Available in Peacock’s Mobile App,” Aug 10, 2026 — https://www.nbcuniversal.com/article/new-interactive-game-public-eye-wolf-games-now-available-peacocks-mobile-app

Variety, “Peacock Launches AI-Generated ‘Public Eye’ Mobile Detective Game From Wolf Games,” Aug 10, 2026 — https://variety.com/2026/gaming/news/public-eye-ai-mobile-game-peacock-wolf-games-1236831297/

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eMarketer, “Wolf Games’ genAI-backed Public Eye aims to shake up daily gaming,” Mar 12, 2025 — https://www.emarketer.com/content/wolf-games-genai-public-eye-shake-up-daily-gaming

GameSpot, “Peacock Is The Next Streaming App That Wants You Playing Games On It,” Mar 2026 — https://www.gamespot.com/articles/peacock-is-the-next-streaming-app-that-wants-you-playing-games-on-it/1100-6538777/

Comcast, “Comcast Reports 2nd Quarter 2026 Results,” Jul 23, 2026 — https://www.cmcsa.com/news-releases/news-release-details/comcast-reports-2nd-quarter-2026-results

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PocketGamer.biz, “Netflix unveils new cloud-first direction for its games strategy,” Jan 26, 2026 — https://www.pocketgamer.biz/netflix-unveils-new-cloud-first-direction-for-its-games-strategy/

Game Developer, “Netflix boss says cloud-based TV games are a ‘big priority’,” Jan 21, 2026 — https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/netflix-boss-says-cloud-based-tv-games-are-a-big-priority-in-2026

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Banronbodo (반론보도닷컴), Apr 20, 2026, citing Media Partners Asia — https://www.banronbodo.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=31599

Luminate Intelligence, “AI & Media: Audience Attitudes” special report, July 2026