NBCUniversal’s platform distribution & partnerships president Matt Schnaars said Comcast is focused on “getting back to simplicity” as it prepares to spin off its cable network portfolio by the end of 2025.
“It simplifies the world for us and allows us to make decisions around how we do everything from go to market strategies to price in a very focused way. Likewise, SpinCo can think very clearly about their cable business without thinking about how it does or does not support a streaming entity,” Schnaars told TheWrap’s Office With a View.
Schnaars has worked in big media for the majority of his career, landing his first job at ESPN in 2004, where he served in a variety of deal and distribution negotiation roles, including vice president of content distribution. He would leave the sports network to join NBCU in 2013, when it completed its merger with Comcast. Over the last 12 years, he’s worked alongside executives like Matt Bond and Steve Burke to help build the company’s content distribution division.
“We’ve gone from distribution of purely cable networks and two broadcast networks, where retransmission revenue was just starting to become a real material part of that business, to now all these years later, the core of my job is really representing NBC and Telemundo in distribution and ensuring the retrans revenue that those networks generate and receive continues to grow,” he said. “The other part of my job is representing something that didn’t even exist, obviously, when I joined the company in Peacock. So the last five years of my career have been a lot of work being part of a group that launched Peacock and then helping grow it over the years working with distribution partners.”
In his new role, Schnaars will oversee content distribution, affiliate relations and strategic partnerships across NBC, Peacock, Bravo, Telemundo and various FAST channels.
“If you think about the world today, you still have a base of 60 million-ish people who buy and subscribe to pay TV services. That includes traditional cable TV and MVPD (cable and satellite) offerings, but also virtual MVPD offerings like YouTube TV. So there’s this big base of the population that still sees value in that aggregated offering and we’re happy to participate in that,” Schnaars explained. “But obviously there’s increasing populations as time goes by who don’t buy pay TV and yet still find a lot of value in what we produce as NBCU, and Peacock is effectively a vehicle for those people and it can overlap.”
SpinCo, which includes USA Network, CNBC, MSNBC, Oxygen, E!, SYFY and Golf Channel and digital assets Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, GolfNow and SportsEngine, will be a publicly traded entity expected to generate approximately $7 billion in annual revenue and reach over 65 million U.S. households. Schnaars said its content isn’t critical to Peacock and will be “well positioned” to grow on its own.
“I’d say [the programming relationship is] a little bit fluid because if you’re NBCU, you’re constantly evaluating your relationship with partners and distributors,” he added. “But if you look at the future, SpinCo networks don’t have a big presence on Peacock and I would imagine there isn’t a huge pivot in that approach. But I don’t want to categorically rule anything in or out.”
What have you learned over the course of your career that has helped you get to the point where you are now?
The trust you build and the relationships you build within your company really mean everything to your ability to both grow as a professional individual. In the job I do, everything is bilateral, it’s distribution with third parties and you can’t do that effectively without building relationships. That happens slowly and by being, first and foremost, really competent and being trustworthy with information and simply doing the things you say you’re going to do. It’s amazing how a simple recipe like that tends to work out.
Content distribution is a big business broadly, but it’s a small industry that’s really 10 to 20 people who are at the center of these multi-billion dollar deals between large media companies and large platforms and you need to ensure, obviously, that you have great relationships across the board. Any misstep — whether it’s misstep in competency or misstep in trustworthiness — can cost you and you never recover. So it’s a really important thing to focus on.
What advice would you give to someone looking to advance in their career or break into the industry?
What I’ve observed in executives in companies who have thrived is that they’re very clear in their vision and communication as to what’s important and what their organization should be striving toward. That applies both in terms of how they lead organizations and what the value proposition is in what they ultimately serve to the end user, the audience, and by extension, distributors. Any really good executive I’ve worked with tends to have clarity of vision, clarity of thought and clarity of communication.
There are really smart people who haven’t succeeded in the industry we’re all in because of their lack of clarity and over-complexity. So whenever we’re in a negotiation that feels really messy or challenging, I try to zoom out a little bit and focus on what are the one or two things that the investors and the CEO of this company really want and need out of this transaction and stay focused on those one or two things. So long as you get those two things right, the rest tends to take care of itself.
When I was graduating college in 2000, streaming video didn’t really exist. It existed in little clips and it was technologically wonky. Years later, I’m in meetings where we consider how generative AI is impacting our business or can we use it to help us, it points to the need to be a continuous learner and really, more fundamentally, to be very versatile. The ability to be versatile, to learn, to critically think, to communicate well is a framework for anybody who’s thinking about media, or, frankly, in any other career right now. Also the ability to understand what underpins technology. It doesn’t mean you need to be an engineer, but you need to understand how engineers think and how data works. How do you actually package data, look at it, analyze it and then come away with practical insights and forecasting for a business?
Anybody who’s thinking about a career media in 2025 who’s just starting out of school, I think the best bet to get in the door whether it’s Netflix, Amazon or a company like ours is working in a data analytics or a technological role where you’re understanding how product is built. Being a product manager, a data analyst, that’s where I see the hiring really happening for companies like ours. As you become an expert in one leg, if that leg happens to be an area that’s a great focus, you get in all the right rooms and you add value in those rooms. A lot of the executives sitting around the table don’t know anything about what you do or what you what you’re an expert in, so it allows you to see and study and emulate what they are good at and how they operate and process problems.
How do you balance content distribution partnerships with companies like YouTube when they’re also becoming your direct competitors for audiences?
You have to look at it like any good company does that has a consumer product offering, which is you segment and sell product and license accordingly. So for Google, obviously YouTube main is a massive video platform and we’ve been a big partner of theirs for a long time with short form content generally and they benefit from that largely around audience and advertising. We benefit from that to a certain extent around audience, advertising and really promotion.
The more that somebody’s watching clips of something we produce in long form on YouTube, it generally is a good thing for that person’s tendency to then go and subscribe to a service, whether it’s a pay TV service or Peacock, that has the same content in a bigger way. So they’re a really important partner in capturing audience and eyeballs, driving interest and really awareness around what we produce. But you also gotta be mindful that you have different partners and platforms and windows, so you won’t see NBCUniversal put out a channel like NBC for free on YouTube main just to have an audience, because that’s a property that costs a lot of money to produce and we have a lot of partners who pay us for distribution.
The positive I see is we have a lot of well capitalized companies out there in media. Some people can see that as scary if you’re not one of those big tech companies. I’m not saying everything that they do is positive, but we do see them acknowledging that companies like NBCUniversal are great at producing content and have value on their platforms, and they want to invest in those platforms to bring out the best in that content and then connect the dots between short-form and long-form. Ten years ago, YouTube TV didn’t exist and now 10 million people receive our content every month through that service.
How do you see content distribution changing over time?
Forever, media companies sold into a network model that a third party sold and it was a great business model for everybody involved for a long time. That’s obviously a changing model, still a successful one through any objective measure. But if you think about what’s happened in the last 5-7 years, everybody’s launched DTC services of any kind of scale in media and if you’re not Netflix, you’re probably still in the middle of your subscriber journey. We like how we’ve done that and we have a really good story here. But you do think about what does the next stage of growth look like?
Consumers generally want to watch sports, news and entertainment that’s split between many different companies. So how do you make it easier for them? I think the some of the bundles that have been out there the last couple years make a lot of sense to be doing. Peacock is part of a bundle at the hands of Comcast with Netflix and Apple TV and I think you’re seeing us starting to do more in that space, working with partners to solve a customer need.
There’s going to be so many different variations of product bundles. But I do think that as you look at some of the bundles that are out there and the price and the lack of all content available in any one bundle vis-a-vis the media system broadly, it shouldn’t be forgotten that there’s a lot of value still in aggregated video solutions. I do think there’s a recognition by the consumer out there as companies innovate that a fully aggregated solution to content really makes sense as SVODs continue to raise price and you get to get a subsection of content versus the whole thing from a video provider. So I’d say you’re going to see a lot of the same bundling behavior from the industry. I’m sure you’ll see us as NBC-Peacock do more around bundles. We’ll do it responsibly. And I think you’ll still see us continue to support pure, aggregated video platforms.
A lot of executives in Hollywood talk about the idea of consolidation. Do you anticipate there will be more consolidation at the platform level in the future?
I don’t want to speculate on M&A, whether it’s platform level or media company level because who knows. We’re a very well situated company and have a great company and financial position where you can just focus on operating well. At the platform level, I don’t know that I see lots of need for consolidation.
What you’ve seen happen over time for the last 10 years is if you go media company by media company, some have been more aggressive than others, but there has been a consolidation of TV brands and networks reflecting the viewer behavior of today. There’s an emphasis, if you’re watching live TV, on a certain category whether it’s news or sports or certain kinds of entertainment and less so on kids. So what you’ve seen media companies like ours do is we used to have a kids focused TV channel and rather than invest in something that might not have a ton of future growth, what any good company does is say, ‘Okay, well, that’s probably not the space we should continue to do invest. Let’s invest in the areas where there is a big consumer demand and fit for what we do.’
If you look back to the channels portfolio that NBCU operated in 2016, you would see six or seven other channels in that portfolio that don’t sit in the portfolio today. I’m not even addressing SpinCo changes in the current portfolio. I’m not sure that every media company has been so proactive. You’re starting to see it happen a little bit more and it probably took some a little bit too long to get there, but I think that’s a good thing overall. What you want is high quality content on any platform. The more high quality content that exists in the platforms that we all license into, the more value those platforms will have relative to their users. It will have a little less cost maybe too, so that is all positive. I’d say that’s where I’ve seen the most consolidation. Otherwise, it’s hard to know where the world goes.
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