1. Is NBCU Bringing Sports Back To Cable
This week, we’re going to look at two moves by NBCU/Comcast that illustrate many of the points I’ve been making about the current state of the media ecosystem in the post-monoculture era.
The first is a WSJ story about how Comcast is allegedly looking to set up a new NBC sports network on cable.
It’s a move that seems counterintuitive at first—sports are moving to streaming not the other way around—but upon closer inspection makes a world of sense.
That’s because live sports may be the most valuable programming on television, especially for advertisers who want to reach a more affluent and educated audience.
In fact, it may be the only way to reach them.
Why It Matters
For a while now, we’ve been flagging something I call “15 Million Merits” after the Black Mirror episode about a world where every wall of a room turns into an advert and the only way to turn it off is to pay, “merits” being the currency of that particular realm.
We have a fairly similar system in 2025 America, where there is a sizable cohort of (primarily) well-off and well-educated consumers who pay for the ad-supported version of all their streaming apps and maintain ad blockers on their Macbooks and iPhones.
Meaning the only place advertisers can reach them is during a live sporting event. Where ads are expected, even appreciated, as an antidote to the announcers endless rambling during timeouts.
(This is, I should note, a particularly American problem, as football of the non-NFL variety does not have constant time-outs, huddles, pitcher swaps and the like.)
But back to NBCU.
Those potential viewers are likely die-hard sports fans who realize they still need cable subscriptions to watch many of the games they want to watch. And while they could find most of the games on the proposed network via streaming subscriptions they likely already have, doing so is, unfortunately, still a whole lot of work.
And so the NBC cable network will be an easy default. It will also boost the total number of people watching the game via NBC properties, thus allowing their sales team to charge even higher CPMs.
Making it a very savvy move indeed.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are NBCU and you haven’t fully committed to this service yet, then by all means go forward with it. It’s sort of a win all around, plus you will reap millions more in carriage fees as cable companies will see it as a smart investment that will keep sports fans subscribing.
If you are an advertiser and you want to reach a certain class of consumer, then live events—live sports in particular—are your saving grace.
As noted, you will rarely catch this group on streaming. Or mobile. Or their browser. So all you’ve got left is hiring influencers on Instagram or live sports and I suspect many of you will look out of place on Instagram, in a Buscemi “Hey Fellow Kids” kind of way.
If you’re a sports fan with a cable subscription, this app is a win as it takes all the challenge out of finding games across various streaming services.
Consider it a gift.
2. Comcast’s New Streaming Store Features A Cast Of Hundreds
Comcast launched something called SteamStore this week, which is essentially its version of Amazon’s Channels store, or, more directly, Verizon’s +play: a way for customers to add streaming services from a convenient hub and to also purchase bundles of their most watched services.
It is, depending on your POV, either an admission that streaming is the future or a way to meet your customers where they are. Either way you look at it though, it’s a smart move, one that is likely to be appreciated by the mass of Xfinity subscribers who are not in the Early Adopter cohort.
But that’s not what is interesting to me about the announcement.
What’s interesting is that there are 450 apps in the offering, including some 100 niche subscription services who clearly have enough runway for Comcast to include them in its offering.
That is a lot of niche subscription services.
Why It Matters
I suspect many of them are low-priced enough that their subscribers don’t bother to cancel, either because they want to support that type of content, forget they have that particular $3.99/month subscription or keep thinking they’ll find the time to watch something on there.
That said, they all also likely have passionate and sizeable fan bases who turn to Reddit and Discord to discuss the content and the overall direction of the service. They are part of what we’ve been calling “Feudal Media”--small unconnected islands of content, each with its own culture, in-jokes and celebrities.
Now what’s notable here is that there are over 100 of these services. Not 10 or 15, but 100. That’s a lot of little bubbles.
Comcast’s plan makes a lot of sense in that people generally like bundles, or the smaller and simpler bundles offered around streaming, anyway.
It’s one less thing to worry about.
Plus they get a single interface, with all the services they subscribe to included, which is much better experience than the industry seems to realize—if there’s one complaint I hear most often, it’s that it is far too difficult to find anything in streaming, even if you go in knowing what you want to watch.
And that if you don’t, going back and forth from app to app to see what they recommend is way too much effort.
Hence the bundle and the popularity of companies like Bango and MyBundle.
One more note on Comcast’s SteamStore: many of the bundles on offer—take the $15/month StreamSaver, for instance— feature the ad-supported versions of the apps that are being bundled, in this case, Peacock and Netflix.
This is notable in that it is a thinly veiled secret that the big SVOD apps are all struggling to build up their ad-supported subscriber base in the US.
The “why” on that is not much of a mystery: the price gap between ad-free and ad-supported remains relatively small—maybe $10/month. And many of their new subs go in thinking they’ll only subscribe for three months or so—just long enough to watch whatever series got them to subscribe in the first place—and so $30 to watch it without ads is not that big a deal.
Especially given that “watch all your favorite shows without ads” has been Netflix’s main selling proposition for the past decade and it’s a hard behavior to change.
So there’s that and the fact that there are people who’d happily pay large sums of money to avoid ads, and I wonder whether the greater savings provided by this type of bundling will lead to a noticeable bump in the size of their ad-supported audiences.
Let’s just say I am skeptical.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are Comcast, well done. This is a smart move and given that you do own a goodly share of the broadband market in the US, giving your customers what they want is a wise decision.
If you are one of the streaming services looking to grow your ad-supported subscriber base, remember that word-of-mouth is still a powerful driver, and so making the experience a good one is key. That means resisting the urge to jam more ads into every break and making sure the same three ads don’t run all the time either.
Something to keep in mind.
If you are an Xfinity subscriber, this is definitely something worth checking out especially if you’ve been looking for a more unified interface.
You’re welcome.
Alan Wolk is co-founder and lead analyst at the consulting firm TV[R]EV. He is the author of the best-selling industry primer, Over The Top: How The Internet Is (Slowly But Surely) Changing The Television Industry. Wolk frequently speaks about changes in the television industry, both at conferences and to anyone who’ll listen.
Week in Review is an opinion column. It does not necessarily represent the opinions of StreamTV Insider.