Peloton Homecoming 2021: Digital Tweaks Announced
The upgrades, announced at a virtual fan convention, make up a trickle of positive news as the company is wrapped up in a scandal over safety concerns about one of its treadmills.
Peloton announced tweaks to some features on its digital platform at Peloton Homecoming 2021, an annual gathering of devotees, this year modified into online programming due to COVID-19.
John Foley, CEO and co-founder of Peloton, announced at the Homecoming 2021 the new or upgraded features amid the virtual proceedings and said they were in response to user feedback. The company unveiled four changes, which are also outlined on its blog and emails to users.
The upgrades are a ray of lightness as the company continues a messy PR battle, insisting its Tread+ device is safe when used properly as government regulators documented injuries to children and warn against buying the treadmill. It’s been a rare jarring scandal for a company whose last year has been filled with surging sales and profits, celebrity partnerships, acquisitions of smaller companies and improvements to user experience.
For users who wear heart monitors, the new feature Strive Score is a metric of time spent in different heart-rate zones (similar to the scoring method at the center of OrangeTheoery Fitness classes). The feature can compare users’ score to a typical one or to their past scores. Strive Score keeps accumulating as users pump up their heartrates across Pelton-enabled workouts, on bicycles, treadmills and the equipment-free classes on Peloton’s streaming service.
“The goal is to give you an easier way to compare your performance across workouts,” said Foley of Peloton at his company’s Homecoming 2021 gathering. “Including those that don’t have power-based output from a connected device, like strength, HITT and boot camp classes.”
Peloton is also revamping its Programs feature, a collection of workouts curated by instructors with specific goals (from improving sleep to getting in shape for a 5K marathon). For “Programs 2.0,” the company is changing the gameplay of these, adding a progress bar, achievement badges and a progression in which once a class is completed, the next class “unlocks” (with some options to skip a class). New Program courses are coming, the company said.
The company is also adding new Distance workouts, its virtual biking and running tours through exotic locales. The company promised at its Homecoming 2021 event new locales and courses guided by familiar Peloton instructors.
The last upgrade is the simplest but also most discussed: a pause button. Peloton devotees have long debated the possibility of pausing on-demand classes, a discussion that veers into the heart of Peloton culture: Some users see the option of pausing classes a convenience that “[j]ust seems like it would be so useful and easy to implement,” as one Reddit post put it. Others feel the theoretic pause button “cheapens the experience and reduces results which hurts the company image,” in the words of one responder. “They want it to have the feel of a real class so you take it as seriously as a real class.”
Peloton has picked a side.
“We’re finally ending a debate as old as Peloton itself,” Foley said at the Homecoming 2021 event. “You guessed it: the pause button. We’re excited to announce later this year we’re giving members the ability to pause any on-demand class and seamlessly pick up where they left off.”
This will be a boom to any users who’ve been annoyed by having to choose between refilling a water bottle mid-class and maintaining their spot on the leaderboard.
