The decision to resurrect the “NBCSN” brand has its origins in a meeting between NBC Sports president Rick Cordella and YouTube executive Mary Ellen Coe at last year’s World Series.
On the latest edition of the Sports Media Watch Podcast, which will be published later Monday, Cordella said that during a conversation at last year’s Fall Classic — which he was attending as a guest of Major League Baseball — Coe suggested YouTube would have interest in licensing Peacock game inventory as part of its then-upcoming carriage negotiations with NBCUniversal.
Cordella: “And so I kind of went back and started thinking, we’ve had this point of view of ‘grow Peacock,’ and that content has to be exclusively on Peacock to grow the subs. But if we’re able to amortize the cost of our content, and we became agnostic to how people consumed it, whether it be through the traditional pay TV ecosystem or through Peacock and DTC, as long as we’re getting paid appropriately for it, why would we care?”
The new “NBCSN” will be a 24-hour channel carrying content that is currently available on Peacock, from live game inventory to studio programming like “The Dan Patrick Show” and “Pro Football Talk Live,” Cordella said. “I’ve told people internally, this is not a situation where we’re going to go invest to take on some of the daytime programming of ESPN or Fox. We’re going to use existing content that exists already within Peacock and within our shop.”
It will not include all Peacock sports programming, as first reported by John Ourand of Puck. “The [exclusive] NFL game that we have on December 27 will not be included. The Olympics will not be included. So there’s still plenty of reasons to come to Peacock,” Cordella said. “But we understand there will be a lot of content that was formerly exclusively on Peacock that now is included within YouTube TV.”
While the only officially announced deal for NBCSN thus far is with YouTube TV, the channel is also expected to be available on other carriers.
The relaunch of “NBCSN” comes less than four years after the original channel, which began as the Comcast-owned “Outdoor Life Network” in 1995, was shuttered. NBC shifted most of its cable sports programming over to USA Network, but then spun off that channel — and other cable channels that carried live sports like Golf Channel and CNBC — into a separate company.
Programming that currently airs on USA Network, including NASCAR races, will continue to air on USA after that spinoff, Cordella confirmed.
As NBCU has built up Peacock with the acquisitions of the NBA and college sports content, Cordella said that the streamer’s growing portfolio necessitated a new cable sports outlet.
“Once the decision was made to spin out our cable assets, we kind of looked around and said ‘we have NBC broadcast and Bravo,’ and it seemed to make sense that we needed an outlet for some of this content. And so I know there’s a little bit of people saying, ‘we capitulated,’ ‘you reversed course,’ It just was that circumstances had changed.”
While he acknowledged that it “sounds kind of crazy to launch a cable channel in 2025,” Cordella touted the decision as a “smart business strategy.” For as much discussion as there has been about the decline of linear cable, it remains the highest concentration of live sports content on television. Cordella: “If that’s where people want to be, we should participate there. And again, we have great content. We get paid appropriately. Let’s do it.”
