NBCUniversal-YouTube deal could jump-start next streaming wars chapter

NBCUniversal’s announcement this week that it’s struck a content deal with YouTube Premium could jump-start a new chapter of the streaming wars — one that could be titled, “Aggregation.”

Under the agreement, which starts early next year, YouTube Premium subscribers in the U.S. will get Peacock Premium baked into their subscription. Peacock content, including wildly popular shows like “Love Island USA” and the Real Housewives franchise, will be available directly via YouTube — as will NBC’s portfolio of live sports like the NFL and NBA.

At launch, YouTube Premium’s $15.99-per-month price won’t change. Customers will get Peacock Premium content for no additional charge.

YouTube Premium — the platform’s subscription, ad-free video product — is separate from YouTube TV, its bundle of live TV networks. The company says there are 125 million global users of YouTube Premium. It doesn’t break out U.S. subscribers.

The deal cements a new strategy for NBCUniversal — agreeing to a streaming wholesale deal with a distribution partner that ingests Peacock content. NBCU did a similar deal with Apple TV late last year, but that bundle required customers to opt into the offering, at a cost of $14.99 per month as opposed to $12.99 per month just for Apple TV. The YouTube deal allows its existing subscriber base to get access to all Peacock content instantly without paying any more money.

NBCU’s decision to allow Peacock content to appear on other streaming services could serve as a template for other media companies that similarly decide they’re willing to partner with other streaming services.

“Other strategies are a little more walled gardens,” Comcast co-CEO Mike Cavanagh said during the company’s earnings conference call last week, referring to other media companies. “Our approach is to build great businesses that serve our own platforms, but look for opportunities to partner.”

The point of the deal for NBCU, which is set be to spun off as a separate publicly traded company from Comcast next year, is to get Peacock in front of more eyeballs. There’s a large, younger audience that spends most of its “TV” time on YouTube. Now these people can stumble upon NBCU programming in their viewing ecosystem of choice – translating into more advertising revenue. 

For YouTube, the deal means a more robust subscription offering in Premium. This may help YouTube in its quest to buy more live sports rights. The company lost out to Netflix to stream several live NFL games earlier this year. 

Still, it remains to be seen how quickly NBCU will strike deals with other platforms. The risk in striking these sorts of deals is the potential to cannibalize a company’s own subscriber base by making the content available elsewhere. NBCU executives felt YouTube offered the right deal economics to assuage those concerns, according to people familiar with the matter.

Both Netflix and Disney are considering striking wholesale deals with other media companies to bring fresh content onto their streaming services, according to public comments and media reports.

ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro spoke to his interest in this concept on stage at CNBC’s Game Plan conference earlier this month.

“As a part of a bundle or a partnership with a third party, we are very much focused on including the content or ingesting it within the ESPN app,” Pitaro said. “It’s like going back full circle to the pay TV bundle. There’s almost no friction. It’s all right there. It’s one app or one service and one username and password.”

ESPN has already struck a deal with the CW to ingest its sports into ESPN’s recently launched standalone streaming app. 

Yet, so far, NBCU hasn’t been satisfied with offers for ingesting its content from Netflix or Disney – or the potential overlap among existing subscribers — according to the people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the conversations were private.

If the first stage of the streaming wars was media companies launching their own services, and the second was about getting them to profitability, the third iteration of this battle is poised to be about aggregation.

Netflix, Disney, YouTube and Amazon are clear aggregators. They all already have the size and scale to reach hundreds of millions of viewers.

If Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery come together as they’ve been attempting to, they’ll clearly be in that camp, as well.

But if the Paramount-WBD deal doesn’t happen — held up by a state-led antitrust challenge — both companies probably fall into the licensing camp, alongside NBCU. That would really jump-start the re-evolution of the cable bundle, as Pitaro suggested.

Fox, which announced its acquisition of Roku last month, could find itself on either side of the equation. Its streaming service, Fox One, doesn’t have the scale of the biggest streaming services, but Roku gives Fox a large aggregation platform if it wants to move in that direction.