LAS VEGAS — Dolby Laboratories and NBCUniversal on Monday, Jan. 5, announced Peacock will be the first streaming platform to embrace Dolby’s full suite of advanced picture and sound innovations.
The announcement, made on the eve of CES 2026 at the Dolby Live amphitheater at the Park MGM Hotel and Casino, builds on a partnership that began 10 years ago with the 2016 Olympics. Last September, Peacock announced it would start serving up NFL games in Dolby Atmos, an immersive, spatial audio technology that allows sounds to come from all around and above the listener for a more realistic and lifelike experience.
The Monday announcement, hailed by Dolby and NBCU as a first-of-its-kind technology integration, will see a gradual rollout of both Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision — an advanced high dynamic range (HDR) video technology that enhances picture quality by optimizing brightness, contrast, and color on a scene-by-scene or even frame-by-frame basis using dynamic metadata — to Peacock’s portfolio of movies, original productions, and live sports and events.
Peacock is extending the availability of Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos across live sports over the coming year, including Sunday Night Football, NBA and MLB. Peacock is also the first streamer to announce its commitment to support Dolby Vision 2 and Dolby AC-4, anticipated to launch later this year.
Peacock is currently gearing up for a live sports streaming bonanza in February, with the Winter Olympics in Italy, the NBA All-Star game and the Super Bowl.
The announcement was made by John Couling, SVP of entertainment at Dolby Laboratories, and David Bohunek, SVP of global video engineering at NBCUniversal, in a “fireside chat” moderated by veteran technology reporter Jake Krol.
“We see a great opportunity to push the video quality alongside the audio even to higher levels, so we’re excited about that,” Bohunek said.
Couling said live sports is a good place to start. “Dolby is known for movies and music, but sports actually is a really deep part of our heritage,” he said. “We first worked with NBCUniversal on the 2016 Rio Olympics, but we’ve been involved in sports much longer than that — actually, for decades. Our first 5.1 broadcast here in North America was back in the late 1990s, and the first Super Bowl in 5.1 was in 2000. So we’ve been involved in the sound of sports for some time, and it’s really all driven by the fact that we want fans to be able to get the very best experience, and that means making them feel like they’re there–making them feel like they are part of being in that stadium or that arena.”
Couling said Peacock is the right partner because the streamer and Dolby both share a vision of placing the viewer “in the emotional heart of the action.”
Both companies, he said, also believe in “pushing technology, but doing that for a purpose that goes far beyond the technology itself. It’s for the purpose of creating that wonderful experience, that immersion, of giving people choice and capabilities, of making the experience just as good as it can possibly be. And when we work with a partner who’s really creating some of the most important and powerful content, they challenge us with can we do this, can we do that, can we make it do the following. And it’s great to be driven by that kind of passion.”
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Peacock also is preparing to adopt the next generation of Dolby innovation. Unveiled at IFA 2025, Dolby Vision 2 is the successor to Dolby Vision, which was originally introduced a decade ago. The company says Dolby Vision 2 “is designed to meet the evolving expectations of today’s viewers and unlock the most out of your television. From helping solve the debate on whether the picture is ‘too dark’ to delivering a more cinematic experience without distracting judder or soap opera effects, Dolby Vision 2 delivers a more authentic, captivating picture.”
Dolby AC-4 is Dolby’s most advanced and efficient audio codec to date, delivering crystal-clear sound with up to 50% greater efficiency than traditional codecs, according to the company. Dolby AC-4 offers new personalization and dialog enhancement features and unlocks the highest audio fidelity possible while using a fraction of the bandwidth of traditional codecs.
Peacock’s Bohunek welcomes the new capabilities that will become available with Dolby AC-4.
“I actually have a little story to share,” he said. “I think it was our first NFL exclusive game we had on Peacock, and during half time we got a phone call from somebody pretty important in our company saying, ‘Hey, in the second half, I really want to hear the commentary more. Can you change that?’ And then two minutes later, we got another phone call from somebody very important in the NFL, saying, ‘Hey, I want to hear the stadium noise more. It’s more exciting that way.”
With Dolby AC-4, Bohunek said, “the customers will be able to choose, and if they want to hear only the dialog, or only the stadium sound, or somewhere in between, it’s their choice. And that’s pretty exciting.”