Comcast said Wednesday that the MasterClass app, which offers instructive videos on topics ranging from gymnastics fundamentals to developing an original TV series, is now available across its Xfinity entertainment platforms, including Xfinity X1 and Xfinity Flex.

According to Comcast, the launch marks the first time the MasterClass app will be offered through a TV provider’s set top box.  

MasterClass's more than 150 instructors and classes span a wide variety of fields, including Arts & Entertainment, Culinary, Business, Design & Style, Sports & Gaming, Writing and more. Each class on MasterClass features about 20 video lessons, at an average of 10 minutes per lesson—all taught by elite instructors like Serena Williams (Tennis), Malala (Creating Change), Simone Biles (Gymnastics Fundamentals), Roy Choi (Intuitive Cooking), Mashama Bailey (Southern Cooking), Richard Branson (Disruptive Entrepreneurship) and Neil deGrasse Tyson (Scientific Thinking and Communication).

Also: Charter, Comcast Set Joint Venture To Create New Streaming Platform

"With today’s launch, customers can now enjoy all of MasterClass's programming right alongside the movies and TV shows they love," Comcast senior VP strategic development Michael DelCiello said in a press release. "Whether customers want to enhance their learning, explore or develop a new passion, MasterClass's robust content library is a great addition to the expanding catalog of programming already available on our platforms."

New and existing MasterClass customers can access the service on X1 and Flex by saying "MasterClass" into their voice remote. Existing customers will be prompted to sign in, while new customers can start the membership sign up process right from the app. ■

Nat Geo has teamed with producers Brian Grazer and Ron Howard to take a unique look at the colonization of Mars in a new series that’s part scripted show and part documentary.

The scripted drama portion of Mars mostly takes place in the year 2033 and follows the efforts of an internationally-based space organization to put humans on the red planet. The pilot episode does a good job of building up the drama surrounding what must be a nearly perfect approach to the crew’s perilous attempt to land on the planet’s surface.

Related Video:Actress/Singer Jihae Discusses Her Role in National Geographic’s ‘Mars’

The series deftly introduces the crew of Daedalus, led by commander Ben Sawyer (Ben Cotton), through testimonies, interviews and flashbacks about the attempt to successfully land on Mars.

The documentary side of Mars takes place in 2016 and features commentary from real-life scientists and experts such as Neil deGrasse Tyson and NASA astronaut Charles Bolden on the science behind space travel to Mars. The segments provide a thorough, research-based account of the potential benefits and risks inherent in successfully travelling millions of miles in space, and add authenticity to the belief that the mission is within the realm of possibility.

Watch a preview of 'Mars.'

The one problem with Mars is that the intertwining of the scripted and documentary elements has the unfortunate adverse effect of slowing down the pace and continuity of the scripted storyline. While some viewers might be fascinated with the facts on how people will survive on Mars — which is explained in full detail — often those factual elements interrupt the more dramatic points of the crew’s mission. Nat Geo too often asks viewers to wade through science class during times where they may just want to get lost in a good action drama.

Ultimately, Mars is a fun and informative ride into space exploration that will take viewers on a mission to a future world — and, potentially, a new television genre.

Zype said StarTalk Radio, a podcast hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson and affiliated with the National Geographic series StarTalk, has selected the cloud video distribution service to power a new SVOD service, StarTalk All-Access.

The SVOD offering is aimed at space and science enthusiasts, and features the full StarTalk Radio and StarTalk All-Stars podcast library and episodes of the StarTalk Live! Show. StarTalk All-Access sells for $4.99 per month or $49.90 per year, and is initially supported on Web browsers and Amazon Fire TV devices. It will debut on Apple TV and Roku later this month.

“A premium subscription service is the natural progression for an influencer such as Neil deGrasse Tyson,” Zype founder and CEO Ed Laczynski, said in a statement. “Neil's work with PBS, National Geographic, StarTalk Radio, and more recently YouTube, has made him one of the most recognizable faces in science.”

Zype, which has also launched a streaming service, recently announced $3.6 million in seed funding led by Revel Partners.

Zype’s other announced customers include Havoc.tv, Luis Network, Chukker.tv, BTV Studios, Mill Creek  Entertainment, The Rebel Media, The Film Detective, The Grind House, Brooklyn On Demand, Shout! Factory, and the All Babies Channel, among others. Zype was founded in 2014 and is headquartered in New York. 

National Geographic Channel will return its late night series StarTalk in October, the network said Wednesday during its Television Critics Association tour session.

Also, the network will develop a scripted drama Red Planet from producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer about man's first trip to mars, according Nat Geo CEO Courteney Monroe.

StarTalk, hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, will premiere Oct. 25 on the channel. The first guest for the second season will be President Bill Clinton, said Monroe.

In other Nat Geo news, the network will also launch a new documentary Parched, produced by Alex Gibney. The limited series will also be developed into a theatrical release, according to network officials. 

The network also said it has ordered a pilot script dubbed Last Men Out about the last 36 hours of the Vietnam War from executie producers Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson.

Monroe also said she's open to another Killing original movie, but the network has no plans for any additional movies wihtin the franchise. The network's Killing Kennedy, Killing Jesus and Killing Lincoln are among the most watched shows in network history. 

Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time, Fox’s Cosmos and two HBO original films were among the Peabody Award winners announced Thursday (April 23) in the categories of children’s programming, documentary, education and public service.

In the children's category, Disney Junior’s educational Doc McStuffins joined Adventure Time as an honoree.

HBO's Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown and The Newburgh Sting were honored alongside Neil deGrasse Tyson'sCosmos reboot in the documentary category.

The 74th annual Peabody Awards presentation is May 31; Fred Armisen (Portlandia, Saturday Night Live) will host.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

An evolutionary biologist, an astrophysicist, a Jesuit clergyman and a comedian walk into a room.

That’s not the opener for a joke.

It’s the lineup for one episode of what is billed as the only late-night talk show devoted to science, StarTalk on the National Geographic Channel (premiering April at 11 p.m. ET/PT). Neil deGrasse Tyson (he’s the astrophysicist), is hosting a TV version of his weekly podcast and radio show. Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium at New York’s American Museum of Natural History and the telegenic successor to Carl Sagan, host of the TV series Cosmos (and a mentor to Tyson), has become this planet’s infectiously curious and charming cryptographer of the mysteries of the universe.

StarTalk is a talk show, but unlike most it’s an odd mix of pop culture, comedy and science — emphasis on the science. For the TV version, Tyson has wrangled a wide variety of cultural luminaries such as President Jimmy Carter, Richard Dawkins, Norman Lear, George Takei, and others for an hour-long romp through topics such as the warp drive on Star Trek, whether religion and science can coexist, and TV and the evolution of culture. Each week, with a comedian there for levity, Tyson explores the ways that science has influenced his guests and calls on his friend Bill Nye the Science Guy to weigh in on the week’s theme. The idea: Make science entertaining.

Tyson talked with Multichannel News editorial director Mark Robichaux about what the new series means to him. The conversation went deep quickly.

MCN: Let’s start off with a couple of easy questions here — what is the meaning of life?

NDT: [Laughs.] So, I actually have an answer to that. What often happens is people search for meaning in life, and that has driven much of people’s life’s quest. But I have come to realize in my old age that looking for meaning in life implies that it’s behind a tree or under a rock or over the hill. And that somehow it’s there and then you have it — as opposed to creating meaning in life by your actions and by your deeds and by your thoughts.

So for me, I try every day to create meaning in life. And I do so by holding to a couple of personal principles. One, I try to learn something new everyday. I try to know something more about the world tomorrow that I know today than I knew yesterday. I think that’s just a healthy posture to have, particularly as an adult when you are no longer still in school. And I think I also try to everyday in however small the gesture is, I try to lessen the suffering of others, however small that gesture might be.

That guides my daily objectives and, for me, that creates meaning every day of my life. So I’m not one of those in search of it because we all have the power to make meaning and not enough of us know that that may be the actual way to get it accomplished.

MCN: Are we alone in the universe?

NDT: Anyone who has studied the problem arrives at the conclusion that we are not likely to be alone at all, that there is surely life elsewhere, possibly even in our own backyard — aquifers under the soils of Mars, in the liquid oceans of Jupiter’s moons, Europa. So we haven’t fully explored our own backyard for life, especially on the possibility that life elsewhere would require liquid water the way we do.

But on another level, you might broaden that further and say, maybe life doesn’t require liquid water, maybe it just requires a liquid. And then could there be a planet of liquid ammonia or liquid methane or some other liquid that is not what’s plentiful here on earth, the water?

If we were alone it would be an extraordinary fact. So it’s less extraordinary to suppose that the universe and our galaxy is teeming with life rather than to suspect that on this little speck called Earth orbiting an uninteresting star called the Sun, in an undistinguished suburb of the Milky Way Galaxy that somehow we are the only place in the galaxy or in the universe with life. That would be inexcusably egocentric.

MCN: In your new showStarTalk, you run far afield of pure astrophysics. For example, “What is love?” Isn’t that a little bit out of your expertise?

NDT: One, the shows are not based on topics. The shows are based on the guest. Normally, when people think of science they think, “Oh, what topic are you going to talk about today and what experts will you bring to address that topic?” No, we bring in guests who are hewn from pop culture, to explore the topics that relate to the guest.

Every StarTalk is a blend of science, pop culture and comedy, comedy manifest by my co-host, who will always be a professional standup comedian in that model that we’ve established for ourselves.

MCN: Doesn’t that levity dilute the nature of the “cosmic” lesson you’re trying to give?

NDT: In studio, I have with me an academic anthropologist who specializes in the neurochemistry of love. And so we go back and forth between the science and the human physiology of relationships, of orgasms, of love. This is a person who has studied brain scans of people in love, people who are in lust, people who transition from love to hate. She has studied this, and she is a retained expert for Match.com.

We will lean cosmic in this, but any topic is fair game as long as it’s anchored in science or technology or the geek-o-sphere.

I don’t think of it as dilution, I think of it as, “I bet you didn’t know how much science there was in this pop-culture topic.” So, are we diluting the science or are we enhancing the pop-culture topic?

MCN: What is your goal for the show?

NDT: Our goal from the beginning was, how do we reach the people who don’t know that they like science or, better yet, are sure that they don’t like science? What excuse will they ever have for hearing a conversation about science? And what we learned is the way to make that happen is to bring people onto the show who have a following — and not because of science, but because of some other thing — and then my conversation with them is about science, and then an entire demographic hears their favorite person engage in a geeky conversation about how science impacts that person’s livelihood.

In that way, we grow the audience of people out there who would warm up to science, who might have had some ember that was growing dim.

Were it not for this fact about StarTalk, it would have never jumped species to television because it is the first talk show on science there ever was in the history of television.

So, I’d like to think that by the time you’ve seen an episode of StarTalk, you’ll say, “Wow, I didn’t know science was there.” I want people to realize that science is everywhere. StarTalk, while it will lean cosmic, all topics of science are fair game. Just so you know.

MCN: Will you have a late night band?

NDT: [Laughs.] No! No monologue, no late-night band. No. It’s only once a week, and they’re pre-recorded, so we’re not chasing the day’s headlines as is so common in the comedic monologues of the late-night talk shows. So the shows will have a certain evergreen aspect to them, which Nat Geo loves, ‘cause they get a lot of mileage from the programming that they air.

MCN: We have a box in some of our longer stories in the magazine called the “Takeaway.” What do you want people to take away from this series?

NDT: I want people to realize that you can be entertained for an hour and at the end of that hour still have learned something. And the learning was so blended with the laughter and your comfort with the pop culture that it doesn’t even register as learning, it just is the new state of mind that you acquire.

National Geographic Channels is partnering with GE on a new science anthology series, Breakthrough, executive produced by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer among others, highlighting the 2015-16 upfront slate. NGC CEO Courteney Monroe, president Tim Pastore and other executives and talent presented the programming plans for Nat Geo and Nat Geo Wild at a gathering at Má Pêche in New York today (April 15). They also celebrated that Nat Geo Channel's distribution had topped 90 million homes (see photo). The upfront event comes shortly after the channel had its most-watched program ever, Killing Jesus, which premiered last month.

Breakthrough, about huge achievements in science, will feature celebrity directors Angela Bassett, Peter Berg, Paul Giamatti (who attended the event), Akiva Goldsman, Ron Howard and Brett Ratner. The initial topics will be brain science, longevity, water, energy, pandemics and cyborg technology breakthroughs, NGC said. Other new series on tap are 50 States Of Survival;Primal Survival;The Great Human Race (an adventure challenge show) and The Yard, about shipbuilding operations.

Returning series include Life Below Zero, Drugs Inc., Wicked Tuna, Live Free Or Die and Brain Games. StarTalk, the new talk show hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson that's set to debut next week, will return in the fall with 10 more episodes, NGC said.

Events on the slate include Saints & Strangers -- a miniseries about the Mayflower pilgrims -- America's National Parks and History Of The World... For Now, from the writers of HBO's Silicon Valley.

New series coming to Nat Geo Wild include Vet School, set at Cornell University's veterinary teaching hospital, and Animal Storm Squad, about first responders who go after trapped and injured pets following a natural disaster. Returning series are: The Incredible Dr. Pol; Dr. Oakley, Yukon Vet; Dr. K's Exotic Animal ER and Cesar 911 (with Cesar Millan). "Big Cat Week," "Barkfest II" and "Sharkfest" will be among the events on tap.

Photo: National Geographic Channels CEO Courteney Monroe, President Tim Pastore, Brain Games host Jason Silva and Life Below Zero star Sue Aikens celebrate that National Geographic Channel is now in 91 million homes at upfront on April 15 at Má Pêche in NYC. Credit: Scott Gries for National Geographic Channels.

Pasadena, Calif.--National Geographic Channel will develop its first ever late-night series in April hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

The series, StarTalk – based on Tyson’s popular podcast – will feature celebrities, comedians and scientists discussing the latest developments in science, said Courteney Monroe, CEO, National Geographic Channels during the network's Television Critics Association press tour here Wednesday.

The series will be produced by National Geographic Studios and will be taped in front of a studio audience at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium, where Tyson serves as director.

Tyson most recently hosted the Fox broadcasting miniseries Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey this past summer.

“After the global success of Cosmos as one of the most watched series in our history, we are thrilled to be partnering with Neil again on Star Talk — his wildly popular podcast that transcends science and crosses over into pop culture — once again satisfying the audience’s passion for adventure and exploration,” Monroe said.

Monroe also announced the network will bring back the long-running nature series Explorer later this year.

The network also announced the summer debut of a new special, Dino Autopsy, and the Fall 2015 premiere of miniseries History Of The World.