Peacock turns into a vertical feed with AI avatars and live sports cropping

Streaming apps usually treat their back catalog like an attic, dusting off old clips and throwing them into random playlists. NBCUniversal wants to take that five-thousand-hour library, hand it over to artificial intelligence, and turn it into an infinite vertical rabbit hole.

NBCUniversal just unveiled a suite of new AI features coming to the Peacock mobile app, led by an experience dubbed Your Bravoverse launching this summer. The platform partnered with Synthesia to build a digital avatar of Andy Cohen, who will narrate and guide users through personalized vertical playlists generated from more than 5,000 hours of Bravo reality TV, resulting in over 600 billion possible viewing variants. Peacock will also debut real-time AI cropping for live NBA broadcasts in 9:16 vertical format this spring, alongside new interactive mobile mini-games based on Law & Order and Jeopardy!.

Six hundred billion ways to binge reality TV

NBCUniversal is betting so heavily on this scrollable habit that it is replacing the download button in the app’s main bottom navigation with a permanent vertical video hub. Downloads are simply moving into the user profile.

Under the hood, NBCUniversal uses computer vision to extract storylines and custom AI agents trained on fan lore to connect moments across decades of Bravo shows. Cohen recorded custom footage in a Synthesia studio to license his likeness and voice, while human editors vet the playlists to keep the AI from hallucinating drama that never happened. The digital host will also introduce brand sponsorships directly within the feed.

It sounds absurd until you look at Bravo fandom engagement. NBCUniversal reports that Bravo accounts watch 92% more non-Bravo content than the platform baseline, with dedicated fans consuming up to 75 episodes a month.

Live sports go vertical

Beyond reality TV drama, Peacock is tackling sports broadcasting with real-time AI vertical cropping. Launching in beta for NBA games this spring inside the Courtside Live mobile feature, the system dynamically reframes the full live game into a 9:16 aspect ratio.

Peacock tested vertical formats during the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, reporting that 20% of viewers jumped straight from vertical clips into live events, and mobile viewers were twice as likely to use multiview options compared to connected-TV audiences.

To keep viewers inside the app even longer, Peacock is also adding mini-games built with Wolf Games' generative AI engine, including a Law & Order hidden-object title and daily trivia from the Jeopardy! team.

Why it matters

We think Peacock’s strategy is a remarkably clear-eyed response to the TikTok threat: if you can't beat vertical short-form dopamine, bring your entire legacy IP catalog into the same format.

For viewers, having an AI curate decades of sprawling reality TV into bite-sized, contextual storylines lowers the barrier to entry for complex franchises. But there are obvious trade-offs. Hardcore reality TV fans are notoriously sensitive to tone, and an uncanny AI host could easily alienate purists if the commentary feels hollow. Similarly, AI-cropped basketball games will inevitably struggle with perimeter passing and overall tactical court awareness compared to traditional widescreen production.

Across the industry, this signals a major shift in how studios monetize deep catalogs. Instead of passive scrolling, NBCUniversal is turning passive archives into interactive, generative media streams. If the Bravoverse experiment drives sustained watch time, expect rival studios to rapidly deploy digital twins of their own marquee talent to talk fans through endless proprietary feeds.