NBC Expands Further Into Digital With New iOS Apps and Big Presence on Snapchat

NBC’s fall TV season is off to a good start.

Sunday Night Football was the No. 1 show during premiere week across the Big Four networks, This Is Us is the No. 1 new show in the important 18- to 49-year-old demographic, and The Voice had both the Monday and Tuesday episodes among the top 10 shows of the week.

With platforms like Roku, Amazon Fire and iOS continuing to grow as a share of overall viewing, Decider sat down with NBC digital chief Rob Hayes to talk about what’s new for digital this fall, including NBC’s recent success on Snapchat and relaunches for the iPhone and iPad apps.

DECIDER: One of NBC’s biggest changes on digital platforms going into fall has been the redesign of the iPhone and iPad apps. Any particular features to highlight?

ROB HAYES: We took Apple’s new iOS 10 operating system into consideration and added a lot of new features. We have landscape and portrait view now. We have more social sharing, a 10-second rewind, and we have a lot more functionality for clips on shows that lend themselves to that kind of viewing.

It looks like you made it a priority to simplify the interface.

Our strategy is to get you to content very quickly with clean navigation. On iOS, we tried to make it easier to get directly to content. The landscape and portrait viewing is something that came up a lot in our user testing that people wanted to see. A big thing for us in the introduction of Chromecast support.

So from iPhones and iPads, you can now send video to Apple TV and to Chromecast?

Exactly.

Do the new iPhone and iPad interfaces change based on the new content available that day, or is it more of a static interface where shows are always in the same place?

The app is editorialized, so we’re scheduling the carousel based on what’s happening that day. Underneath that, we’ll generally have the most recent episodes that have aired. We also have a scheduling feature that defaults to different content at different times during the day.

Is every fall show available on every platform the day after broadcast for authenticated satellite and cable users?

About 90 percent of our lineup is available the next day with all episodes available for the whole season, and all of the new shows are available the next day and with full-season stacks.

What’s the availability of shows this fall for non-authenticated users?

For non-authenticated users, new shows are available the day after they air, and returning shows are available eight days after they air.

You have live streaming available on the NBC app in some markets. Do you have expect to see that become available in more markets this fall or over the next year?

I think you’ll see that happen on a rolling basis as those conversations happen.

Those are carriage agreements that you have to make with the individual station groups?

Exactly right.

Will any of the new or returning shows have digital-only elements like director’s cuts or webisodes?

We did a Snapchat series on the five Mondays leading up to The Voice premiere, which I think was a first for a broadcast network. Snapchat is an exciting platform to be on right now. The strategy there was to take the five Mondays leading up to the premiere, and introduce a Snapchat version of The Voice.

Can you talk about the metrics any for the Snapchat series?

It grew week over the week. The first episode was a call to action where we announced we would be doing the series and that we had the participation of the four coaches. We have two new coaches this season — Miley Cyrus and Alicia Keys — so that was an exciting way to introduce them to a young demographic that’s very present on Snapchat. We thought we would get a thousand submissions of 30-second videos of people singing, and we received more than 20,000 videos in 24 hours.

How did you promote that?

We promoted it within Snapchat and on The Voice’s social handles — Twitter, Facebook and Instagram — but we didn’t do any paid media. It was all organic, social promotion. We had some internal benchmarks, and we exceeded those right out of the gate and grew views and subscriptions to the series week over week. It skewed female but not as much I thought it might. And it skewed younger than the traditional, which was why we wanted to do it. We were really happy with the results.

Will you do some engagement with Snapchat in-season also?

We are. We wanted to get through these first five episodes, but I’ve very encouraged by what we saw. We anticipate doing more during the season, and we’re working now on what that creative will be. We’re taking a step back to figure out what makes sense before we get to the live shows.

Any other major digital elements for fall shows?

Our strategy right now isn’t to develop a lot of original content for digital as much as extending content and storylines for the shows that we have on the air. We have social teams embedded in the production of every show, so we’re constantly collecting and creating a variety of content — some serialized, some social and some more talent-specific. For Blindspot, we’re doing a weekly show with Jaimie Alexander on Facebook Live from her trailer on the set. We’re doing a Snapchat with SNL and with Jimmy Fallon that we’re working on now.

Is Aquarius the only experiment you’ve done on digital where you put a lot of episodes of a series out at one time?

It is. With Aquarius, we experimented with getting a season out there for people to binge. It’s a consumer behavior that’s becoming prevalent with VOD viewing. New shows seems to benefit from that approach, but existing shows or shows with familiar brands seem to work better with a weekly rollout. That’s been my general observation.

Do you think you’ll do that again, or does that not really fit into what NBC is doing?

The innate challenge is having the show completely produced from the start. Right now we’re going into the fall season, and all of those shows are in production on fall episodes.

Of NBC’s new shows, I like This Is Us and Timeless a lot. Are those the two that seem to be driving the most attention?

We’re really excited about both of those shows and also about Superstore, which has done incredibly well and grown its viewership on VOD over the summer, and The Good Place. We’re looking at this fall season as really expanding on a multi-platform approach. Linear is still the mothership, but people are viewing more and more on those alternative platforms.

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider and is also a contributing writer for Playboy and Signature. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.