What to Expect from The Peacock Streaming Service

Peacock will also run a comedy special and an interview series from Kevin Hart’s Laugh Out Loud company, new animated episodes of “Curious George” and “Where’s Waldo,” and Premier League matches.

Other streaming services, like the Disney-owned company Hulu, offer discount plans that come with ads, and the still-gestating short-form video app Quibi, set to start streaming April 6, will also go the ad route.

Comcast does not expect Peacock to be profitable in its first five years, executives have said. The cable company, which has 21.4 million video subscribers and 28.2 million broadband subscribers, plans to inject $2 billion into Peacock over its first two years.

“Getting in the game with Peacock is the right way to preserve an audience, but it will be very, very expensive,” said Peter Supino, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein.

Peacock will give companies a lot of advertising options, with tech that will allow for ads that show up when viewers hit pause and others that will appear during bingeing sessions. The service will have five minutes of ads per hour or less, according to NBCUniversal, which is also capping the number of times an ad can appear for the same viewer. The company said that it will use customer data from Comcast set-top boxes, advertising partners and its own collection to deliver relevant ads.

“Ad-supported streaming is about more than giving consumers what they want, it’s also about giving advertisers what they desperately need,” said Linda Yaccarino, NBCUniversal’s ads chief.

The platform will become the main digital repository for shows like “Saturday Night Live” and “The Tonight Show,” content available on YouTube that NBCUniversal would prefer to bring more securely into the corporate fold.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/business/peacock-streaming-nbcuniversal-comcast.html?emc=rss&partner=rss