NBCSN is back!
The cable network was formally resurrected Monday on YouTube TV and will essentially serve as an ingestion vehicle for Peacock content on linear TV. So if you want Bucks-Cavaliers Monday night, you can get it on YouTube TV if you don’t have a Peacock subscription.
What else will fans get? Content like the NBA playoffs, MLB regular-season games (I hear that deal is very close covering the next three seasons), the Premier League, select Olympic events and the Gold Zone program during the upcoming Milan-Cortina Games, the WNBA, Big Ten, Big East, U.S. Open golf, Open Championship, Kentucky Derby, studio shows and more. That’s a lot of sports for fans.
But what does this mean for NBC? Execs there spent a lot of time and money curating content that was meant to be exclusive to Peacock (like this NBA game Monday night). For league partners, it’s likely a win to get more exposure on a cable channel -- especially within YouTube TV, which is one of the distributors out there actually seeing subscriber growth.
Peacock? Not so much -- yet -- on establishing a big foothold within the streaming world. The most recent Nielsen Gauge estimates have it around 1.5% of the streaming landscape. That’s well behind others such as Paramount+/Pluto TV (2%), Tubi (2.1%) and Roku Channel (2.8%), and that’s before you even get to the big guns like Prime Video, Disney OTT channels, Netflix and YouTube.
Could this content have just gone to USA Network? Nope. Not after the split that created Versant, where USA now lies. The only cable channel NBCU kept around was Bravo, and unless there’s a “Real Housewives of the Big Ten” show I don’t know about, you’re not getting sports content there.
I chatted with an executive close to NBCU strategy on why this made sense, and even with the challenges related to launching a new channel, it really came down to the “live” aspect in terms of driving value.
But maybe for NBC, and other behemoths like ESPN or Fox, this sort of move does make sense in 2025. Like those other companies, NBC will have offerings that sit in pay TV and streaming, and while the ordering to get there may have been different the endgame seems to be the same.
Looking forward, expect NBC -- and others -- to strike more of these kinds of deals with MVPDs and vMVPDs all across the space.
