Comcast and Roku have come to an agreement months after NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service launched. Peacock will be available to stream on Roku in the coming weeks.
“We are pleased to have reached an agreement with Comcast that will bring Peacock to Roku customers and maintains access to NBCU’s TV Everywhere apps,” a Roku spokesperson said. “We look forward to offering these new options to consumers under an expanded, mutually beneficial relationship between our companies that includes adding NBC content to The Roku Channel and a meaningful partnership around advertising.”
The decision comes after Comcast and Roku got into a public argument over the status of dozens of NBCUniversal apps. Comcast threatened to pull the apps as negotiations over Peacock continued; this included 11 network apps, 12 NBC-owned stationed apps, and 23 Telemundo apps. Both Comcast and Roku pointed fingers at each other for walking away from ongoing negotiations at the time, but just hours after the announcement came, word came that a deal, which would include Peacock landing on Roku, was imminent. Peacock is still unavailable on Amazon Fire TV devices.
In linear television, this strategy leads to carriage disputes. These are periods of time when certain channels and programming are unavailable because the cable providers and the content providers can’t agree on a deal. They’re referred to as “blackout periods.” In this specific instance, Roku, a streaming aggregator that carries content to TV sets, is the cable provider. Comcast is putting pressure on Roku to try to make a deal by removing content, while Roku can argue that without its platform, millions of people will find other ways to watch said content.
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