NBCUniversal's Streaming Service Is Called Peacock and It's Launching Next April (vulture.com) 69
NBCUniversal's upcoming streaming service finally has a name -- Peacock -- and a whole bunch of newly announced programming. From a report: The long-in-the-works service will launch next April, anchored by more than 15,000 hours of content from the entertainment conglomerate's TV and movie vaults. In addition to a previously announced deal to take back The Office from Netflix in 2021, NBCU Tuesday said that starting next fall, Peacock will also be the exclusive streaming home for the Universal TV -- produced Parks and Recreation, which currently streams on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video. The new service has also locked down deals for a slew of originals with ties to existing NBCU brands, including a reboot of Battlestar Galactica overseen by Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot), revivals of Saved by the Bell and Punky Brewster, a comedy/talk show hosted by Late Night's Amber Ruffin, a new spinoff from The Real Housewives universe, and a new comedy from The Good Place creator Mike Schur starring The Office's Ed Helms.
Another streaming service to ignore. (Score:1)
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Re: Another streaming service to ignore. (Score:4, Insightful)
People saying they want "flat" cost is why it sucks. You're never, ever going to have anything that doesn't suck unless you give up on flat pricing. At the very best, flat pricing can approach the quality of paying-for-what-you-use with the only downside being that flat pricing will necessarily cost you more.
But if we stop asking to pay more, so that we no longer offer to subsidize things that are worthless to us, then maybe some day non-pirates will be able to get something good.
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Sort of truthy, but the actors generally get additional monies from syndication and other distribution. So part of the rev stream does likely make it back to the actors, in many cases.
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Sort of truthy, but the actors generally get additional monies from syndication and other distribution. So part of the rev stream does likely make it back to the actors, in many cases.
Except Hollywood has routinely cheated actors out of their residuals since the inception of the industry.
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The actors of already been paid. The creators of the show have already paid the cost of creation.
At this point the show itself should not be charged for
I guarantee that if you were an actor or a producer of a TV show, you wouldn't let anyone try and take your residuals.
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They have flat pricing for music steaming services. Why not have a similar model for video streaming?
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No reason, from their point of view. Of course they're going to be happy getting more money from you. But the reason you shouldn't want that (just like for music) is that you'd probably prefer to pay less.
Why wouldn't all-you-can-eat buffets be a ripoff? If you were selling, wouldn't you make sure?
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"until they offer a low-cost unified service that includes everything at flats cost " is another word for Cable TV that's an old stupid idea.
The purpose of month-to-month subscriptions is you only activate the one or two you want that month and leave the rest paused until there is enough content to binge watch.
It's a lazy non-argument to say you won't stop stealing content until they give you cable tv again.
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Well back to piracy, until they offer a low-cost unified service that includes everything at flats cost
So basically cable. Ah, the cycle of never learning anything from our past continues.
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They're multiplying like cockroaches! A guy could go broke if he subscribed to all of them.
Yeah, it gets a little spendy if you subscribe to them ALL and leave them all on full time.
I subscribe to the one or two that has shows that I want to watch currently, and then when they are over, turn them off and subscribe to something else.
Going that route, my monthly service (can't call it cable anymore) bill is about $30.00.
Annual pricing (Score:2)
I subscribe to the one or two that has shows that I want to watch currently, and then when they are over, turn them off and subscribe to something else.
How long before subscription video on demand providers catch on and institute annual pricing? Amazon already made Prime annual.
But at least you have a choice! (Score:2)
They're multiplying like cockroaches! A guy could go broke if he subscribed to all of them.
Even now subscribing to all major streaming offerings would still be cheaper than past days when you took a premium cable bundle...
But the great thing is you don't have to subscribe to all of them. Just pick one you really like to stick with, subscribe a month at a time to something else until you've watched most of what you like from them and cancel.
Far easier than trying to do the similar thing with cable services,
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I only use one service. (Score:1)
I'll give you a hint: It involes saying ARRR a lot. ;)
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Which is absolutely not the way to purchase subscriptions.
If that's your goal stay with cable.
Gold Rush! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Or...
Is it a - work with me here - a service that aggregates all these different subscriptions, which we'll call "channels", into something that we call a "bundle" or "package", kinda like how a cable company combines 300 different channels (295 of which you'll never watch) into a single package...
Oh, wait. That'll never work.
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a) more and more of these guys seem to be staggering content precisely so you can't binge it - I'm not sure if their motivation is to prevent the behavior you describe; I think it's more likely to keep people coming back to their sparse content deserts time after time to get one more bite of cactus fruit per visit, but the net effect is to make the A/B/A/B approach not work.
b) since
Why is it painful? (Score:2)
Leaving aside the fact that tracking subscriptions like this and opening and closing accounts is a bit of a pain in the butt,
On an AppleTV it is super easy to subscribe to, and cancel, many services including HBO.
a) more and more of these guys seem to be staggering content precisely so you can't binge it
Not at the start but just subscribe at the end of the season, or near the end to where the last show will air during the month you subscribe.
if the A/B/A/B model becomes popular, one of two things will hap
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>If that prediction were try why has it not happened yet?
Because there are three incumbents - Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime (though AP is a real special case, since it is actually a freebie tacked onto a completely unrelated delivery service) - and everyone else is in subscriber acquisition mode. As you are seeing in the press recently, many of the contracts that provide content on the three bigs are still in their last months
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On an AppleTV it is super easy to subscribe to, and cancel, many services including HBO.
While it's easy to do, it's the tracking that is the pain. Sign up for A, set a reminder to cancel in 28 or 29 days so that it doesn't trigger the monthly renewal. A week later sign up for B and set another reminder. Two weeks later service C comes out with a series that you've been wanting to see for ages so you sign up for that but forget to set a reminder. As you've been watching service C for the past week you didn't finish the series on service A so you reset the reminder to allow another month on tha
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It was barely worth it for Netflix when they had all the reruns. I have no desire for NBC or CBS or ABC.
The only reason they and their 95% shovelware shows could exist was because they were free and could eke out advedtising. There's nothing there for binging much less ad-free binging. Netflix could swing it for a while inhaling all that went before.
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You can still get CBS, NBC, and ABC free via OTA transmissions, no need for streaming unless you want their shows on-demand.
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You can still get CBS, NBC, and ABC free via OTA transmissions, no need for streaming unless you want their shows on-demand.
Ads are too oppressive nowadays. It's really not worth my time to watch anything OTA.
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There's going to be consolidation. Unlike cable services, people can easily activated and drop accounts for these streaming services. Most people I know are already in the habit of subscribing to one for a few months, binging what they want from it, then dropping it and going on to the next one, until a year or so later they circle back to the first to binge what's new, rinse and repeat.
Streaming services make financial sense on paper only when your subscriber base sticks around, but when 1/3 or even more
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Once streaming becomes more established I'm sure that the companies will try to stop people from subscribing to watch a series and then dropping the service. They'll probably implement something such as only being able to have the service at an email address or payment type (credit card number for example) once per 12 months. The email address limitation won't stop most people here.
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The aggregating "service" should be something that you run on your equipment. If this is done correctly, there won't
We have "subscription for every single show" (Score:2)
The logical end-game of all this balkanization is a different subscription for every single show.
We have that. On Apple TV. You can buy an individual TV episode or a season. Don't want to sign up for CBS' subscription, have zero interest beyond Star Trek Discovery. You buy a Star Trek Discovery season on Apple TV and save money.
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The logical end-game of all this balkanization is a different subscription for every single show.
Episode.
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Or if you watch a wide variety of networks, but only a few shows on each, why not just.
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Then wait until TVs have 64 HDMI ports on the back.
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vs brands that have to buy other brands content, starting making content...
Except you can sell the same gold many times ... (Score:1)
As many as you like. Without adding any actual work. ... err, I mean "profit"!
Ok, you can only take $10 per nugget. But what does it matter, if the nugget is worth $10 million, but you can copy it *infinitely*, raking in $100 million to $1 billion or more, a decade, for all eternity (= Life of the Disney universe) forever!
After a year, the digging work will be paid off. And from then on, it's only putting your feet up, automated stealing, robbing and theft
Hmmm..... (Score:2)
So far, I see nothing at all compelling enough for me to want to pay for this.....
With more content, less appealing than most (Score:3)
To me this service seems completely uninteresting. None of the projected shows sound at all good.
Even Apple with only a limited set of shows has come content that sounds more interesting!
There are no details on price, but my guess is $10/month as they have an over-inflated opinion of what they are offering.
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To me this service seems completely uninteresting. None of the projected shows sound at all good.
Agreed. Most of it sounds like reboots of old properties. Yet Another Battlestar Galactica? In the description above, I see one show not based on something done before.
I also like the "There'll be dozens of films from the Universal library." Ooh! Dozens!
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What, you're not just itching to find out what's happened to that cute little Punky Brewster during the past 30 years?
(Spoiler: She's now a 45-year-old crack-addled divorced mom, with seven kids, living in a trailer park in Encino.)
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I'd long argued that the content transmission companies (ISPs, cable companies) needed to be independent from the content production companies (NBCUniversal, Disney, Warner, etc) in order to preserve a robust marketplace. But that seems to have fallen on deaf ears, so we're now seeing the
to get it all = more then cable and not in one? (Score:2)
to get it all = cost more then cable and not in
one bill
one ui
one set of rules about multi streams
Re:to get it all = more then cable and not in one? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or realize that you don't need it all. Subscribe to the services that has content you want to watch and don't pay for ones that don't interest you. That's what I did when I cut the cable cord. I have Netflix (which I had in my cable days), Amazon Prime (which is mostly for free shipping), and Hulu (yes, the ads version). I'm likely going to add Disney+ because they have interesting content. I'll still be saving money over cable TV's costs.
Yes, there seems to be a "gold rush" to provide online streaming networks. Eventually, those with too little content, too confusing interfaces, and/or priced too high will drop out and we'll be left with a stable group of online streaming providers (with the occasional potentially disruptive startup).
Misspelled name! (Score:1)
It's actually Peecock!
As in: The cock they are gonna piss on cord cutters with.
Organized crime is organized crime is organized crime.
That's (Score:2)
Wait until consolidation happens (Score:5, Insightful)
their second choice for service name was Uranus (Score:1)
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Reboot of this, revival of that.... (Score:2)
Now I Got This Stuck Inside My Head... (Score:2)
Thanks, NBCU. Now I have this stupid song stuck in my head:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
This is different (Score:3)
How much did Slashdot charge NBC for this (Score:2)
Lol (Score:1)
Seasonettes (Score:2)
Cool, I can watch all the really interesting shows they cancelled after half a season.