Competitive strength/weakness: Even after a launch announcement last week, Peacock remains one of the murkiest direct-to-consumer efforts. Unclear is how deep the content well will go — a number of past NBC hits (e.g., “Seinfeld” and “Friends”) were made by other studios and have been sold elsewhere. Also unclear is the relationship between the platform and Comcast’s cable service. The company wants to walk a line between attracting cord-cutters and incentivizing customers who subscribe to Comcast. It remains to be seen how exactly they’ll do this in their packages — and whether it will work.
• CBS All Access
Price: $5.99 with ads/$9.99 without
Ads: Ad-free and ad-based
Available: Now
Top content offerings: Plenty of old-school TV hits, such as “Cheers” and “Cagney & Lacey” are on the service. So are new originals such as the upcoming “Star Trek: Picard” spinoff, this year’s “Twilight Zone” reboot and “Why Women Kill,” the dark comedy from “Desperate Housewives” creator Marc Cherry that was recently released. And there’s “The Good Fight,” the spinoff of fan favorite “The Good Wife.” A subscription also comes with live CBS TV, which means NFL games, CBS News programming and the Grammys.
Competitive strength/weakness: CBS has a major streaming advantage over its network competitors: It’s been doing this awhile. The first original shows launched on All Access all the way back in 2016, years before Warner and Comcast even announced plans to jump in. So there’s a track record and a long slate of originals. The challenge for All Access is branding: Far fewer people know about it than they do, say, Netflix. The company said earlier this year it has 8 million digital subscribers including Showtime’s service — a fraction of its Silicon Valley competitor. Part of the problem is demographic — CBS has the oldest media viewer age of all broadcast networks, a challenge given the younger ages of many streaming consumers.
• Amazon
Price: Included with a $119 annual Prime subscription
Ads: No ads
Available: Now
Top content offerings: Amazon’s been spending big on Sundance movies lately, purchasing the Adam Driver whistleblower tale “The Report” and Mindy Kaling’s TV dramedy “Late Night,” in addition to producing upcoming films such as this fall’s period adventure “The Aeronauts.” It also has a smattering of prestige TV shows, including Emmy comedy winner “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and current critical darling “Fleabag,” which won four of Emmys last Sunday, including Outstanding Comedy Series and Best Actress in Comedy.