As the TV industry pivots to streaming, NBCUniversal boldly predicted that its viewing time with digital audiences will equal its time spent viewing by linear audiences within the next two years.
At its NewFront presentation, NBCU said that including subscribers to its Peacock direct-to-consumer streaming service, it can give advertisers access to nearly 200 million consumers every month across more than 300 digital endpoints.
Viewers will stream 10 billion hours of content in 2021, with people already watching 900 million hours per month, NBCU said.
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To reach as many Peacock viewers as possible, NBCU unveiled Spotlight Ads. When an advertiser buys a Spotlight Ad, their commercial is the first ad show to every viewer who tunes in to watch anything on Peacock within a specific time period.
Peacock has had 42 million sign ups but NBCU CEO Jeff Shell has said that only about a third of those are monthly active accounts, which means they’re either paying a bill or using the service monthly.
NBCU said Peacock’s monthly reach in key demos is expected to be on par with broadcast prime by the fall.
NBCU also said it is expanding its ability to dynamically insert ads into its some of networks, now available on its app to when the networks are distributed by virtual MVPDs.
Dynamic ad insertion will be available on CNBC, MSNBC, Syfy and USA Networks when they’re carried by AT&T TV Now, FuboTV, Hulu Live, Sling and YouTube TV. CNBC, enabling advertiser to extend their reach with precision digital targeting against high value audiences.
NBCU said consumption of its content on vMVPDs is up more than 50% year over year.
In addition, NBCU said it is extending its contextual intelligence product to digital, allowing brands to align their commercial messages with NBCU programming.
The contextual matches are made by NBCU’s proprietary machine learning platform and the IAB’s category taxonomy.
