“NBCU’s streaming plans will be somewhat different from those brandished by many of its competitors,” write Brian Steinberg and Cynthia Littleton in Variety. “The offering will be free to NBCU pay-cable subscribers in the U.S. and will be supported by advertising. Plans call for the streaming service to be made available to subscribers of both Comcast, NBCU’s parent company, and Sky, the European satellite broadcaster that Comcast acquired control of last year.”

Steinberg and Littleton continue, “NBCU intends to use its coming broadcast of the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo ‘to put a lot of afterburners on this service,’ says [NBCU CEO Steve] Burke, who believes ‘consumers are going to get used to having multiple services, and they’ll pick three or four services and bundle themselves.’ NBCU wants to achieve scale quickly, he adds: ‘We want to build a platform that has lots and lots of people using it, so we can start to make money with advertising.’”

The story adds, “Burke thinks the ad-supported model, rather than one that’s subscription based, will make the streaming outlet more accessible and give the company a fighting chance against established players. ‘When we analyzed it, Netflix has so much product and so much of a head start that to come out with an SVOD product, it’s tough to imagine getting to success quickly. It’s much more likely that we’d have years and years of banging our heads against the wall,’ says the NBCU chief. ‘We kept looking at how do you do this without losing billions and billions of dollars.’”

To read the full Variety story, please click here.