Your free Peacock ride is over, Comcast Xfinity subscribers

Earlier this month, Peacock killed off its free, ad-supported tier, seemingly out of an attempt to make it more difficult and more generally unpleasant to access the streaming service’s surprisingly excellent stash of originals (no bullshit on that, Charlie Cale, we mean it!). But hey, there’s always Comcast Xfinity cable subscribers, who get access to Peacock premium tier for free! They’re technically on the hook, and they’re not going anywhere.

Until now! Yes, things seem to be getting slightly worse for the ol’ colorful bird, with Variety reporting that Comcast will soon be ending its “free Peacock” promotion for Xfinity subscribers. Starting on June 26, they’ll have to pay to see The Office and Poker Face and a third thing (maybe Shrek or Shrek 2?) just like the rest of us. There will reportedly be some kind of discounted rate for Xfinity users, and new customers will still be able to get free Peacock for a while, but nobody’s getting limitless free Peacock anymore.

This comes after a rollercoaster 2022 for the streaming service, which didn’t increase its subscriber numbers at all in the second quarter but bounced back by the end of the year and doubled its count (with five million paid subscriptions coming in the final quarter alone, according to a statement from Peacock). The higher-ups at NBCU seem to be buoyed by that, plus the platform’s new crop of original shows and some high-profile movie deals that make Peacock the place to stream TÁR, M3GAN, and Puss In Boots: The Last Wish. It’s also now the only place you can get next-day NBC shows, like Saturday Night Live, since Hulu lost the next-day streaming rights to those last summer. That means this, and the loss of the free tier, are either dangerously risky moves that will make people less likely to give Peacock a try or bold, confident swings to raise the profile of its big-name original shows and exclusive movies. We’ll see!

Note: An earlier version of this story neglected to mention the upturn in Peacock’s subscriber numbers over the course of the second half of the year. It has since been updated.