Get ready to add yet another service to your ever-growing collection. Amid a flurry of executive shakeups, NBCUniversal announced that it has its own streaming service in the works, with an eye on a 2020 debut.
NBCUniversal said that the new service will include both “homegrown original programming as well as content from outside partners,” and that its subscription model will be a little different than what you’re used to. If you’re a pay-TV subscriber or a Comcast or Sky customer, you will be able to use NBCUniversal’s service for free, while cord-cutters will be able to access the service via a traditional subscription fee.
The new service will be ad-supported, although NBCUniversal claims that customers will be able to remove advertisements from the stream for an additional fee. Pricing information is not available yet — expect that to come a little closer to the service’s 2020 launch date.
The new service won’t be NBCUniversal’s first foray into the streaming market. NBCUniversal’s parent company, Comcast, owns a stake in Hulu, although Disney will end up with control of that service once its much-ballyhooed Fox acquisition becomes final. Seeso, NBCUniversal’s comedy-focused streaming service, opened in 2016, only to shut down a little over a year and a half later.
It’s not clear what the upcoming service means for NBCUniversal programming on other streaming platforms, although there’s a good chance that you’ll need to become an NBCUniversal subscriber to watch them. NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke told Deadline that it’s a “safe assumption” that the company will try to reclaim streaming rights to series like The Office, which former NBC Entertainment chairman Bob Greenblatt claimed was the most popular acquired show on Netflix. NBCU and Netflix’s deal regarding The Office expires in 2021.
NBCUniversal joins a growing number of media companies establishing their own streaming services, including a few of its direct competitors. CBS All Access, home to Star Trek: Discovery and Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone reboot, launched in 2014, while the Marvel and Star Wars-heavy Disney+ is scheduled to debut later this year.
In other words? There are already too many streaming services out there. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, we have a guide that should help keep things straight.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?