Peacock pushes interactive scenes

The Future. Peacock is bringing film and TV special features into the stream, starting with the new season of The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip. If the capability is rolled out across its scripted and unscripted content, Peacock may have devised a perfect way to update old-school DVD bonus features for the streaming age.

Real Housewives, every angle
For season 3 of The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip, Peacock will include several “interactive scenes.”

• Per TechCrunch, users have 15 seconds to decide if they want to access the bonus content when the scenes appear.
• That includes exclusive interviews, extended footage, and, in the future, the ability to watch what’s happening in another room.
• Users don’t have to access the bonus content if they don’t want to and can quickly navigate back to the main timeline whenever they want.

The feature will only be available on Roku devices when it launches next year but will roll out to other platforms “over time.”

Keep that remote handy
This isn’t Peacock’s first brush with interactive content.

• For its English Premier League games, the streamer has a feature called “Catch Up with Key Plays,” which allows viewers to watch highlights side-by-side with the game in real time.
• The platform also has an interactive game titled Halloween Nightmare Game, where users can click on objects on the screen.
• NBCUniversal also struck a deal with Meta to bring interactive Peacock content to Meta’s Horizon Worlds VR platform.

With Netflix also toying around with interactive games and Disney+ dropping an AR short, the ability to manipulate content in real-time may be the next frontier of streaming.