Did Seeso Have To Die For Peacock To Live?

If you were tuned into the Golden Globes on NBC this weekend —many of you apparently weren’t— you were witness to a series of commercials touting Peacock, a new streaming service being launched by NBCUniversal this spring. The teaser spot was light on actual details but heavy on the tease; “Something entertaining is hatching soon,” the piece promised (warned?) viewers, before stating that it would be “Streaming 2020.”

A spot-check of Twitter that night found a lot of people wondering “What is Peacock?”, but there’s an even better question to ask: If Comcast/NBCUni is committed to spending billions of dollars to launch a brand new streaming service in 2020, then why didn’t they keep Seeso around?

For those of you who blinked and missed it, NBCUni launched a streaming service targeted at comedy fans called Seeso back in January 2016. The subscription service charged subscribers $3.99 per month (less than any of the big streamers, existing or forthcoming) for a wealth of classic comedy content from the U.S. and the British Commonwealth, including the catalogs of Saturday Night Live, The Kids in the Hall, The Office (UK O.G. edition), Parks and Recreation, Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, The IT Crowd, and series from Steve Coogan, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. And they also boasted a wealth of original new content, including dozens of stand-up specials. That’s all gone now. Moved on to other platforms, or worse, into the digital ether. A few, such as sitcom Take My Wife, and variety series The UCB Show, and Night Train with Wyatt Cenac, landed on Starz.

Bajillion Dollar Propertie$, a semi-scripted parody of reality real-estate programs, got stranded for two years with an unaired fourth season in the can. It only recently found a home on Pluto TV, Viacom’s free streaming platform. Bajillion creator Kulap Vilaysack told Decider: “It’s a tough thing. You know, I think it’s a little different when there is an entire season ready to go. Like it’s already been edited? It is in a package waiting to be seen. And for a creator, that’s really tough because we all worked so hard on it. And I think it’s so funny. And you want it to be seen and laughed at like, that’s why we made it, so for it to just be on ice for as long as it had been was hard.”

Even if nobody you knew outside of the comedy industry subscribed to Seeso, the platform held immense value for comedy fans — value that could have propelled the future Peacock (or a supersized Seeso) into an even bigger, better, quicker player in these streaming wars of 2019-2020.

So what happened? Do any of NBCUni’s moves make any sense? I’ve been asking people closer to the situation if they can explain this to me.

Matthew Ball, a TV analyst and former Amazon Studios exec, talked me off the ledge, at least about NBC’s recent cancellation of Sunnyside —which, for our money, would’ve worked well on Seeso OR Peacock— saying contract negotiations and timing all come into play. He added, “There’s probably a very logical reason for that (decision) and you should interpret this strange period as them working through” that logic. Bigger picture, as Ball explained it to me: When NBCUni shut down Seeso in 2017, network programming executives didn’t think they’d have to draw up a streaming replacement so quickly. None of the network execs thought the Streaming Wars would actually start in 2019.

“The big issue has been they estimated there would be one more deal cycle before they had to go digital, one more cycle of output for films,” Ball said. Universal Pictures, for example, have a deal in place with HBO that runs through 2023. “When Seeso was started and Seeso was shut down, Disney hadn’t declared what they were doing,” Ball said. “Obviously there would be a strong preference for eyes to roll into Peacock, but nobody would have predicted that” back in 2017. “Seeso, despite being shut down, and because it shut down, you rationally would have believed it failed. But in having an alternative use of The Office, they were able to get Netflix to pay (a lot more) for five years. That is a small win.”

In happier days, when NBCUni was bullish on Seeso in 2016:

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Evan Shapiro, who ran Seeso (after previously running IFC, Sundance Channel and Pivot), and is now running a revived National Lampoon brand, starting with podcasts featuring the next wave of would-be comedy stars.

Was Seeso doomed from the start, tho?

“In its geography inside a much larger company, unfortunately probably so,” Shapiro told Decider. “At the end of the day, the content was great. Like, I’m not trying to be immodest, but we had indications from the community, from reviewers, from everywhere else, that everyone loved the content. The numbers were doing what the numbers were surprisingly meant to do, which is growing month to month. But the intestinal fortitude of a corporate entity when it comes down to it, to losing money is not something — look how long it took Disney to just get to SVOD, to OTT. It took them forever. Now they’re going to kill it. But it took a long time, and they’re going to lose $20 billion doing it. That’s their number, not my prediction. A company like Comcast NBCUniversal who’s addicted to quarterly profit statements is not necessarily in a mood to lose $30-40-50 million a year building a brand-new business. Especially if the entirety of their business is tied to the traditional model almost entirely.”

In Comcast’s Q3 Earnings Call back on October 24, NBCUni CEO Stephen Burke stressed:

“I think the most important thing to think about as you’re thinking about Peacock and its role inside NBCU and broader Comcast is we’re not doing the same strategy that Netflix and people chasing Netflix have adopted. We’re primarily working with the existing ecosystem and doing a lot of AVOD activity. And what that’s going to do, we think, is make the — is cut the investment pretty substantially because I think we’re going to get to cruising altitude much more quickly than a subscription service. We’re also playing to our strengths. We happen to be part of a company that has 55 million video customers and is the biggest provider of television advertising in the United States. So we’ll have a mix of originals, exclusive acquisitions like The Office and a lot of non-exclusive product as well. Importantly, we’re going keep selling to other companies. We — if you take movies, for example, we plan to keep selling into the premium window. We’re not taking all of our movies off of premium platforms like HBO or Sky or other platforms around the world. So I think our approach is different. I think it fits the strengths and characteristics of our company well. And with — it’s a very, very interesting time as everybody tries to figure out what their strategy is, and we’re very optimistic. We’re planning on launching in April. We’re going to use the Olympics as sort of an afterburner after our launch, and then we’ll be adding content pretty significantly throughout 2020. And I’m very pleased with the technical progress our team is making. It’s a wonderful product. The product is beautiful and very different and I think something that we’re all going to be very proud of when we launch in April.”

Nobody asked Burke about learning from the company’s mistakes with Seeso.

Ball agrees with Shapiro that “Seeso wasn’t set up to succeed. It wasn’t given enough money, enough time, enough support.” Not to mention the platform served a niche market with content that fans could find on other platforms without paying another subscription fee. “At the same time, something like Peacock should have been set up years ago,” Ball added.

The On Demand online lifestyle isn’t new. And Ball noted that Comcast, which plans to fuel Peacock’s success with ad support, already owns and operates “one of the largest ad vehicles, Freewheel. So there was nothing precluding them from doing that years ago.”

But Comcast didn’t put Seeso behind the Freewheel. So to speak.

Shapiro replied: “If we had gotten a television spot during every Saturday Night Live, if we had gotten a television spot during every Tonight Show, if we had gotten a television spot during every Seth Meyers, if we had gotten television spots inside primetime comedy, I think we probably would have had a better shot at it.” That’s what Peacock is doing now, or ramping up to do, at least.

“We still would’ve lost a shit-ton of money. So I don’t know if it was before its time. I don’t think the niche streamers really have much of a future. I think there will be players like a Crunchyroll and smaller players like that that have a pure niche that might work. But I think this time next year, Disney+, HBO Max, Apple, in addition to Quibi, and Netflix and Hulu and Amazon.”

Bigger traditional media have a tougher time pivoting than the tech-based upstarts do.

“Where’s Viacom’s SVOD?” Shapiro asks.

They don’t have one. They would get CBS All Access in the Viacom-CBS merger. They do have Pluto TV. Which is home to one former Seeso series: Bajillion. “Our situation was unique to the Seeso shows,” Vilaysack said. “Paramount was our studio,” she said. Not Universal. “So it’s complicated, right? Seeso was only licensing it from our studio, which is Paramount. So there’s another cook in the kitchen. Right?”

But she held out hope for two years that some other platform or network might be interested in buying the show, or perhaps even extending its run. “And I do get it, it’s like even though Seeso was around for just a short while and there was a paywall, and so not everybody in the world, in fact, a mere fraction of them were subscribers to Seeso meaning not a lot of people saw it…in the marketplace, it was viewed as a geriatric show. Three seasons, it’s not a brand-new shiny thing, which is hard to hear, but yeah, quite frankly there wasn’t a lot of interest in picking it up.”

“I had to downshift to like, I just want people to see the season. I just want people to see our work. And and we were so fortunate and having Pluto put it up on on their site,” she said. “I can’t tell you how nice it is to have like a really great player. And to have it all free and available, all the seasons to be free and available that anyone can see.”

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.