NBCUniversal Launching Its Own Streaming Service Next Year

NBCUniversal is the latest to jump into the Great Streaming War. CNBC reports that the company is set to launch an ad-supported streaming service in 2020.

Unlike Hulu, Amazon or Netflix — the latter of whom just raised their pricing, NBCUniversal’s may not cost you. The service will be free to anyone who is already a subscriber to a pay-TV platform — such as cable or satellite. Those who don’t can subscribe for around $12 a month, which will include access to about 1,500 hours of shows from NBC such as Parks and Recreation along with “hundreds of hours” of Universal films.

The big key here is whether NBCUniversal can get a deal with the pay TV providers. That isn’t expected to be a problem though, and if the partnerships are secured it would bring the total number of “subscribers” to somewhere in the 30-40 million range. The ad-supported service will run about three-to-five minutes of ads per every hour, which will make for around $5 per subscriber via ad revenue.

“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,” NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke said. “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.”

The good news is that there are no current plans for NBCUniversal to pull its content from other streaming services.