How the streaming service will change how you watch TV in 2025.

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Your favorite streaming app may soon no longer be just a “streaming app” per se, but an overall entertainment app that functions as a cross-medium platform of its own—and a necessity on both your smartphone and smart TV.

This week, Peacock, the NBCUniversal service that catapulted off a successful 2024 to become one of the most popular streamers in the United States, began rolling out a bunch of new goodies in its latest update, part of the testing phase for a gradual expansion of platform features. Subscribers will now gain access to a significant array of pilot programs: new engines for discovery and for personalized recommendations, bonus clips for beloved shows, and even NBC-themed “mini-games” that will be updated daily, showcasing characters and storylines from the platform’s shows and sportscasts.

“After presenting the Paris Olympics on Peacock and testing interactive features like ‘Choose Your Reality’ for shows like Real Housewives, we’ve learned that fans want to have options in their viewing experience and dive deeper into their favorite content,” John Jelley, senior vice president of product and user experience at Peacock, told me. He added that the platform is “piloting new features” to allow users to interact with sports and TV shows “so they can indulge their obsessions in a way that’s fun, super simple, and all in one place.”

The 2024 Olympics was a massive success for Peacock, with the Summer Games fueling a significant viewership and subscription surge as well as interest in the streamer’s gimmicks: the “Multiview” feeds that allowed viewers to watch various concurring sporting events at once, the NFL-inspired “Gold Zone” coverage of the game highlights, and the sophisticated A.I.–powered re-creation of broadcaster Al Michaels’ voice, which led users through daily bite-size recollections of each day’s events, customized to their chosen sports and preferred means of recapping (e.g., “viral and trending moments”). The spirit of those features is being replicated in these tests—for sports and even beyond that.

There are a couple of different ways this will manifest on TV/laptop vs. phone. For TV, the streamer will begin testing a Live in Browse function, which automatically streams an ongoing sporting match, such as a Premier League face-off, at the top of the screen. Also added to the homepage: a new banner for “Critically Recommended” picks that will offer you options as determined by both the titles’ Rotten Tomatoes scores (the movie-review site is owned by Fandango, another Comcast subsidiary) and what the app thinks you may enjoy based on your viewing history. For additional browsing, the TV app will roll out new channels themed by genre (Comedy, Drama, Kids, etc.) and keep a live, “always-on” stream of curated genre selections going for viewers to tune in whenever. (The service’s long-standing channels will remain a part of the guide.) And of course, there will be key events (news, sports) livestreaming at the top of the channel guide, ensuring that something relevant is always playing as a user is searching.

The mobile app is going to make things even more interactive, with experiences tailored to each individual Peacock subscriber. On your phone, you’ll soon start to see custom playlists of “Can’t Miss Clips,” featuring Instagram Story–like vertical-video galleries tailored to some of Peacock and Bravo’s most popular reality TV properties, like Love Island USA, with first looks at new cast members, interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, handpicked “must-see” highlights, previews, and recaps.

Peacock is also rolling out a slate of games designed to lock in younger subscribers, such as a word game called Daily Swap, a matching game called Venn, and a sports betting–like game called Predictions that’ll allow users to predict things like who might win a soccer match or even which of your favorite reality TV stars will advance to next week’s challenges. (Jelley states that in the near term, there will be no integration of social media or sports-betting connections into this game, which will operate more like your typical fantasy league.) These games are in the experimental stage on various phones right now, with a broader rollout planned for the spring, depending on results. During the initial testing phase, Peacock says some users will see both the games and the vertical video playlists, some will see one or the other, and some will see neither.

Although Peacock is one of the first streamers to bring together this wide range of experiences on its app, it’s a part of a trend that’s been developing within the industry for a while now. Apps, even video streamers, can no longer serve just one purpose. They need to do anything and everything to keep users’ attention. For example, audio giant Spotify transformed its mobile app into streams of TikTok-style visual exhibits, the streaming platform Max created a wholesale game show over who will be determined the biggest Friends stan, Netflix branched out into word puzzles and Squid Game–trademarked video games, and Disney+ added channel guides for hyperspecific program streams, not dissimilar to the gargantuan menus of nonstop Three’s Company and Judge Judy channels you can scroll through on Pluto TV. (And of course there’s Elon Musk’s stalled efforts to make X/Twitter an “everything app” for your daily needs.)

As streaming cannibalizes traditional TV once and for all, it’s incorporating nostalgic formats and cobbling together all sorts of experiences to make sure you stay on one chosen app and that app alone—to demonstrate your brand loyalty in addition to your cultural enthusiasm. The future of streaming doesn’t just look like the past; it looks like a future in which you’re plugged in and engaged at all times via ever-increasing offers of exclusives that make one particular platform really stand out among all the others.

It’s not just libraries and IP and broadcast rights that streamers will leverage for customers. It’s games, streams, and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to make sure you don’t switch away from Peacock after you’re done watching Homicide: Life on the Street. Peacock has fired its warning shot in a significant way. We’ll see very soon how the other services follow.