An AI avatar of Andy Cohen will start name-dropping brands on Peacock this summer

If your TikTok feed isn’t inundated with videos of Rob Rausch from the Traitors finale last month, there will soon be another place to see America’s favorite snake-catching overalls-wearer.

Beginning this summer, Peacock is rolling out “Your Bravoverse,” a vertical video product featuring an AI avatar of Andy Cohen, host of the eponymous Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, that will guide viewers through personalized Bravo content on mobile devices, which according to the company will highlight “iconic scenes, connected storylines, and behind-the-scenes moments.”

“Your Bravoverse” will also offer a new way for advertisers to activate on Peacock. The Andy Cohen avatar will, according to NBCUniversal, be able to reference brands during interactions with users in a new advertising capability. The goal is to keep users hyperengaged: The streamer developed over 600 billion combinations of content, stitching clips and weaving storylines together so users “can go down that rabbit hole forever,” John Jelley, SVP of product and user experience, Peacock and global streaming, said during a press event at 30 Rock.

“That’s way more stars than there are in the Milky Way,” he said. (About 500 billion more, to be exact: NASA estimates there are around 100 billion stars in the galaxy.)

“Your Bravoverse” is one of several ways NBCUniversal is looking to boost engagement on Peacock, which last reported having 44 million subscribers in January. During the Milan Cortina Olympics last month, NBCUniversal rolled out several vertical video offerings, including “Rinkside Live,”a feature that provided vertical video from multiple angles around hockey and figure skating competitions, as well as vertical recaps called “Can’t Miss Highlights.”

Peacock is also rolling out mobile games, including one based off of the Law & Order universe, debuting this summer, and one tied to Jeopardy!, rolling out this spring, the company announced.

Overall, short-form content on the streamer has been on the rise, with the company reporting in December a 257% year-over-year increase in viewership of that kind of content consumed on mobile devices.

Peacock isn’t the only streamer investing in vertical video for mobile engagement. On Thursday, Disney+ rolled out a short-form content feed called “Verts,” which it first teased at its Global Tech & Data Showcase at CES. The TikTok-like feed will highlight clips from movies and TV shows on Disney+ to start, but the company has indicated that “content from creators that reflects our fandoms, plus other storytelling formats, content types, and personalized experiences” will eventually factor into the experience. Netflix, the industry leader, has more than 100 mobile games loosely tied to its TV and film franchise that are available to subscribers.

When in Rome: Matt Strauss, NBCUniversal Media Group chairman, said Peacock identified the opportunity to increase engagement on its own platform after seeing fans migrate to other platforms to talk about happenings on Love Island. The intense fan engagement shot the Love Island app to the No. 1 spot on the App Store last summer, which made the company reevaluate its own strategy.

“It was about voting. It was about shopping. It was about other ways that you could play along,” he said during the press event. “But you actually had to leave Peacock in order to do this...Creating fandoms, tapping into fandoms, and extending them, but doing it on our platforms, is really where we see the white space.”

Even more vertical video is set to arrive on Peacock later this year. The streamer is planning to use an AI-powered cropping tool to create vertical video out of live sporting events for mobile viewers, starting with NBA games.

There may be more options for advertisers, too: At the end of last year, NBCUniversal indicated that additional vertical video buying options would become available to advertisers starting in 2026.