• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, December 16, 2022

Is streaming still the way into young viewers' minds and hearts when it comes to news? Free, ad-supported streaming news service NBC News Now thinks so.

NBC has said average viewers watch an hour at a time and tend to be significantly younger than the older viewers watching cable and broadcast news.

The better news here for the streaming platform is that it is making a "profit" -- a word that may be hard to come by in the streaming space for virtually all players (except the likes of Netflix, of course).

NBC News Now doesn't dance around the issue of trying to be a separate kind of platform for viewers. It's about news, pure and simple.

This would be unlike what Fox Nation has started up -- a subscription-based, ad-free service that offers up documentaries, non-scripted informational shows and the like. But not much real-time news content.

For NBC News Now, a service started up in 2019, we still don't know how many monthly active users it has. Still, NBC says since 2020, average monthly hours watched on NBC News Now are up 125%, as well as averaging 100 million views per month and more than 30 million hours streamed per month.

All this comes on the relatively recent heels of CNN+ closing down earlier this year after seemingly spending several hundred million dollars starting up the service with the belief that it could get to profitability in three years.

Financially frugal senior executives under new owners of CNN -- now called Warner Bros. Discovery -- somewhat expectedly, put the kibosh on this chancy and costly high-profile effort.

How did NBC News Now figure it out? We have some hints -- at least from watching.

Among its talent roster, it uses  MSNBC and NBC Television Networks news personalities and hosts.

In addition -- unlike Fox Nation -- NBC News Now is free, streaming and totally advertising-supported. That makes for easy access and sampling.

All this makes sense under the NBCU framework when it comes to some streaming efforts --like its very basic Peacock option, which is free to consumers, also with advertising support.

Perhaps one other point when it comes to costs is that while many think of TV news these days as a 24/7 venture, NBC News Now is efficiently scheduled for just 10 hours of live programming a day, with non-live, mostly documentary programming in other dayparts.

NBC News Now appears to have found a way to tread lightly when it comes to other news content via its cable news networks -- MSNBC and CNBC distributed via cable, satellite, virtual and telco services.

Local market pay TV providers can be sensitive in their carriage deal-making with cable networks --especially when consumers can get the exact same content elsewhere. For free.

NBC News Now is available as a channel on Peacock, and The Roku Channel, YouTube TV, YouTube, FuboTV, Xumo, Pluto TV,  and Tubi, as well as other web areas.

If cord-cutting continues to be the way of the world -- and pay TV providers can’t provide ever-higher carriage and other retransmission fees -- I believe other TV content providers will also find more unique ways of segueing into the streaming world.