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The $3.99 a month service called "Seeso" will launch in
January, offering popular NBC comedy shows such as "The Tonight
Show Starring Jimmy Fallon," monthly live streamed comedy
concerts, a movie library and original content.
The service represents the latest bid by a traditional
broadcaster to tap rising demand for "streaming" services from
viewers who shun pricey television bundles.
Other networks like CBS Corp have offered online versions of
their entire networks. NBCUniversal chose to serve up a
genre-specific product, Executive Vice President Evan Shapiro
said at an event in New York on Thursday.
The move is significant in that NBCUniversal's parent company
Comcast is the nation's top cable operator and competes with
services such as Netflix, Hulu and Dish Network Corp's Sling TV,
which for $20 a month offers a slim bundle of channels, targeted
at viewers, especially millennials, who consume video content
online.
"The broader these services go, the harder it is to serve
individual tastes ... when you do kids and horror and everything
in between ... you've created the new version of the bundle,
which is something that creates a big frustration, said Shapiro,
who spearheaded the project. "You're paying for it all even
though you are watching a small subset of that."
The service, which will be available on seeso.com, ioS and
Android devices and streaming video boxes such as Roku, was
meant to be complementary to pay-TV packages and other streaming
services, Shapiro said on Thursday.
Seeso will also offer NBC hits such as "30 Rock" and Poehler's
"Parks and Recreation," a catalog of 40 years of "Saturday Night
Live," an exclusive library of the famed Monty Python comedy
series and three to five new movies each month, NBCUniversal
said in a statement.
To appeal to younger viewers who like short-form content, the
service will offer clips of comedy shows. NBCUniversal has
invested in original content providers from YouTube stars to
Poehler, who will co-produce and co-host a show named after her
improv and sketch comedy group "The Upright Citizens Brigade."
The service will be available through an invitation-only beta
test in December. A free trial offering a limited portion of
Seeso content will not require users to provide their credit
card information, Shapiro said.
(Reporting by Malathi Nayak; Editing by Christian Plumb)
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