• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, Today

NBCUniversal's Peacock streaming service has made big gains when it comes to advertising revenue around that platform. But now it needs to focus on subscription revenues as well.

That's where Amazon comes in.

In a wide-ranging deal between Comcast and Amazon, NBCU’s Peacock Premium Plus, the ad-free tier, will now be available on Amazon Prime Video Channels, in a bundle-like approach -- appearing as a separate ‘tile” on Prime Video operating/navigation system.

The cost for consumers is $16.99 a month/$169.99 per year. More than 100 streaming subscriptions are now available via Prime Video.

This all extends the connection between the two companies. Peacock has already been available on Amazon Fire TV, Amazon’s streaming distribution service, for its ad-supported streaming option -- $10.99/month or $109.99 per year.

For both companies, this comes as NBC’s Peacock has just signed a new NBA contract and is nearing another new sports deal with Major League Baseball.

For NBCU’s networks and streaming services, this would extend its highly viewed "Sunday Night Football" to "Sunday Night Basketball" and perhaps "Sunday Night Baseball."

However, streaming advertising growth has been uneven at best. Core streaming/linear advertising across five legacy-owned media companies has declined 2% to 7% for the last several quarters, according to Bernstein Research.

As the streaming market has matured, advertising-revenue gains have weakened due to rising streaming advertising inventory -- partly because of Amazon Prime Video starting up its ad-supported option.

The good news is that D2C subscription revenues are steady, if not growing -- so much so that the combined linear TV/D2C subscription/affiliate business has seen continued 2% growth over the last few quarters, according to Bernstein.

The bad news is that linear TV affiliate revenue continues to be impacted, with around a 4% decline in each of the last three quarterly periods. That means D2C needs to continue to do the heavy lifting.

Additional pieces of the NBCU/Amazon deal continue to have individual movies from Universal Pictures available on Prime Video -- and Prime Video conversely now continuing to be available on Comcast Xfinity X1 and Xumo’s streaming/TV network distributing platform.

The broader picture comes back to what analysts always like to ruminate over, including industry executives. Mike Hopkins, head of prime video and MGM Studios for Amazon, tells CNBC they like that consumers can put “their own bundle together.”

There are more options for consumers to consider, of course, with easy and harder ones to figure out. More variations on the theme to come?