The NBCUSSAL-Youtube television distribution fight highlights the new streaming power struggle
By Aditya Soni
(Reuters) – NBC popular shows, notably “Sunday Night Football” and “America’s Got Talent”, can disappear from YouTube TV on Tuesday if the two parties do not agree on a new distribution agreement, a dead end that could influence the future of television.
The car talks have stalled on the rates that alphabet YouTube television (Googl, Googl) will pay to distribute NBCUNIVERSAL emissions to its 10 million subscribers made up of Comcast (CMCSA), said the two companies.
But greater negotiation is looming behind the scenes, and it reflects the new weight of YouTube as a dominant video service supplier in the United States.
YouTube TV wants to show content offered exclusively on the Peacock streaming service of Nbcuniversal – like the successful reality series “Love Island” – directly on its platform, a person familiar with discussions told Reuters. Currently, users must open the Peacock application to see the emissions, even on YouTube TV.
Known as “direct ingestion”, it is an approach to which Nbcuniversal opposes, because it wants to preserve the peacock – which it launched in 2020 – as an autonomous service which can collect subscriber data and sell targeted announcements. For YouTube, the security of NBC content would help its efforts to become the largest paid television distributor in the country and strengthen the basic advertising activities in Google – which also belongs to Alphabet – on Smart TVS, where advertising locations order premium tariffs.
These battles “will have important strategic implications for the future of the media,” said Richard Greenfield, Lightshed analyst, in a note to customers. The Disney car agreement with YouTube TV should also renew at the end of October and similar discussions will probably occur then, he said.
“We suspect that YouTube TV cares much less about the rate he pays in the end and much more to be able to ingest content from inherited media streaming applications,” he said.
YouTube now explains most of the vision of television in the United States, before Rival Netflix streaming and traditional media companies such as Disney, according to Nielsen.
Its cable -shaped subscription service, YouTube TV, ranks among the four largest American paid television distributors, and the deep alphabet pockets recently gave it a lever effect on Paramount and Fox Corp in carriage conferences, according to media companies and analysts.
NBCUNIVERIVERSAL has offered YouTube the same terms he has extended to other major television distributors – including the main video channels of Amazon – and seeks to include his streaming service as part of the Youtube television programming bundle distributed, said that the person familiar with negotiations, who asked for anonymity because the discussions were private.
