Peacock Pins Subscription Hopes on Instacart Partnership

Instacart is offering its Instacart+ members access to Peacock, a move that comes as subscription services increasingly tap partnerships across industries to expand their audiences.

The grocery aggregator announced Wednesday (Nov. 29) a move to provide its paid members with access to Peacock Premium at no additional cost.

“We’re excited to marry the convenience of shopping with Instacart with Peacock’s unparalleled content offerings,” Heather Rivera, Instacart’s vice president of strategy, partnerships and corporate development, said in a statement. “An hour saved on a trip to the store means an hour more of fan-favorite shows from Peacock.”

Meanwhile, for Peacock, the partnership enables the streaming service, which operates in a highly competitive space, to reach new customers.

Instacart is not the only aggregator to tap subscription partnerships to drive adoption, though historically the offer has typically gone the other direction. Grubhub, for instance, has offered free yearlong (and then briefly two-year) Grubhub+ memberships to Amazon Prime members as well as free yearlong subscriptions to Bank of America cardholders. In Canada, DoorDash has taken a similar tack, offering free yearlong DashPass memberships to Prime members in the country.

In each of these cases, subscription companies have the opportunity to drive memberships by working with providers that they do not compete with in any way, leveraging the chance to reach new audiences to stand out against rivals. 

These moves come as consumers rely on subscriptions in more parts of their day-to-day lives.

According to research featured last year in the “Subscription Commerce Tracker®,” a PYMNTS and Vindicia collaboration, consumers spend an average of $273 per month on subscription services.

Plus, another study highlighted in the report found that half of all consumers now subscribe to video streaming services, while 41% have a membership with a shopping service. As such, pairing a video streaming service with a shopping service enables both to reach a significant portion of consumers.

Competition for consumers’ subscription spending is escalating, Allison Vigil, president of Rocksbox, a monthly subscription service that rents jewelry to customers with an option to buy, told PYMNTS in an interview for the Tracker®.

“Customer acquisition has just continued to get more and more competitive over time,” Vigil said. “As that acquisition has gotten more challenging, it’s become even more important to retain the customers that we’re working so hard to find.”

In fact, PYMNTS Intelligence’s study “The State Of Subscription Business: Best Practices And Business Performance Drivers,” created in collaboration with FlexPay, which is based on a survey of 200 executive decision-makers at companies that offer subscription-based services and products, found that 30% reported facing churn from losing customers to competitors’ services or products.

Overall, however, subscriptions are on the rise.

“Broadly, on an industry level, subscription commerce is going to have to continue to proliferate,” Michael Broukhim, co-founder and co-CEO of lifestyle membership FabFitFun, told PYMNTS in an interview last year, “such that even describing it as a category loses some meaning any more than you’ll talk about retail or stores as a category within retail because stores are so many different manifestations of an experience you can create.”