NBCUniversal is Joining the Streaming Race With a New Service

Netflix, Amazon, and Disney, better hold on to their hats. A new player is going to be in town and it’s Comcast’s NBCUniversal.

NBCUniversal is jumping into the streaming race with a new service that will compete with the companies above. The service is expected to launch in 2020 and will have 1,500 hours of NBC TV shows as well as hundreds of hours of Universal movies. The service will be run by Bonnie Hammer, the company said.

The streaming service is going to be a free, ad-supported product for anyone that subscribes to a pay-TV service. For those who do not have this service, it will cost $12 a month.

According to the company, it thinks it can get about $5 in ad revenue per user with the service. “NBC will air between three and five minutes of ads per hour of programming,” said NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke to CNBC.

“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. “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.”

Burke also said that the service will bring in content from other companies like Sony, Discovery and Warner Bros.

Disclaimer: We have no position in Comcast Corporation (NASDAQ: CMCSA) and have not been compensated for this article.