Seeso

» see seeso.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

seeso was a us-only product at the licensing layer. nbcuniversal's catalog rights to snl, parks and rec, the tonight show, all of it stopped at the us border. the iplayer-style regional walls that the us streaming services run on meant that by 2016 in turkey i was not signing up to a comedy-niche subscription, even if i had been interested. honestly, by 2016 the only us streaming service i had ever signed up to was netflix, and that was through a vpn for the early years before the official turkish launch.

seeso launched january 7 2016 at $3.99 a month, pitched as a comedy-only siamese sibling to hulu under evan shapiro, who had run ifc and then moved to nbcu's digital group in december 2014. the catalog was a comedy slice of the nbcuniversal back catalogue, saturday night live, the tonight show with jimmy fallon, parks and recreation, monty python re-runs licensed in for the brand legitimacy. the originals were the more interesting bet, harmonquest with dan harmon, bajillion dollar properties from kulap vilaysack, the ucb show, take my wife with cameron esposito plus rhea butcher.

the comedy-vertical streaming bet was the same bet several other companies were making at the same window. funimation for anime, crunchyroll for the same audience, briefly mubi for art-house, fandor for indie film. the broad netflix model was being unbundled into single-genre subscriptions, and seeso was nbcu's pick for the comedy slot. it lasted about 22 months before the cancellation announcement went up.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

inside the comedy press the seeso originals got reasonable coverage, harmonquest in particular pulled the harmontown podcast audience over and ended up running three seasons. bajillion dollar properties pulled the upright citizens brigade improv crowd. the ucb show was effectively a televised version of the ucb stage. it was an internal-club roster. the people who liked dan harmon and ucb already knew most of the names on the slate, which made the originals look good in trade press, and also made them niche.

the cancellation announcement on august 9 2017 was vague about cause. nbcuniversal said it would not be ordering any more original programming, the trade outlets read between the lines as a subscriber-count problem. seeso never published numbers but the consensus in variety and the verge coverage was that the base was somewhere in the low six figures, well below the floor required to keep ordering original tv. comcast was already reorganizing its streaming plans around what would eventually become peacock.

~ how it actually ended ~

the service went dark on november 8 2017, 22 months after launch. existing subscribers were refunded prorated balances, the harmonquest seasons moved to vrv first then to other platforms over the next two years, bajillion dollar properties ended up on amazon prime. some originals never made the migration cleanly and disappeared from the streaming market for stretches before showing up later on amazon or apple tv channels.

the peacock launch in july 2020 was the platform seeso was eventually folded into, three years too late to feel like a continuation. peacock's tiered model includes both the comedy backlog seeso had launched with and a much larger swath of nbcu content that seeso would not have had at the price point. the comedy-only vertical bet was the experiment, the lesson seeso left behind was that there was no audience for a comedy-only us subscription that did not include any of the broader nbcuniversal catalog.

~ the long tail ~

in 2026 nobody mentions seeso unless reminded. harmonquest is the asset that comes up first when someone tries to remember what was on it, in part because dan harmon kept being relevant on community and rick and morty afterward. bajillion dollar properties pops up in lists of underrated 2010s sitcoms. the rest of the originals are footnotes. seeso.com redirects to nbcuniversal corporate, the brand is gone, the platform is gone.

the streaming-niche bet that seeso made was a smaller version of the bet quibi made later, that you could carve a narrow vertical out of the netflix model and convince enough people to pay for it. quibi had hollywood money and lasted 6 months. seeso had nbcu's backing and lasted 22 months. neither finding worked. the bundling-back-up direction the industry took afterward, peacock plus parent-conglomerate libraries plus catalog and originals together, is the post-mortem.

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