NBCUniversal will launch a streaming service next year that will be free to Americans with a traditional pay-TV subscription, including competitors. At this time, it does not appear the service will be available in Canada at launch.
According to a CNBC report, the service will cost approximately US$12 a month for those that don’t subscribe to a pay-TV service. Content will include 1,500 hours of NBC TV shows, such as Saturday Night Live and Parks and Recreation, hundreds of hours of Universal movies, on-demand programming as well as live TV like news and sports.
NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke said NBC will air between three and five minutes of ads per hour of programming, which he estimated would generate US$5 per month from every user on the service.
“One of the interesting things about this that makes it different and innovative is that we’ll have a big emphasis on free-to-consumer,” Burke said in the report. “We want to create a platform that has significant scale and can scale quickly. The best way to do that, is make it free to consumers and leverage the fact that NBCUniversal’s sister company is a cable company and now owns Sky.”
