NBC News’ ‘Today All Day’ streaming service repackages content that showcases softer content

By Michael P. Hill Article may include affiliate links

NBC News launched its “Today All Day” streaming service July 15, 2020 — and it relies heavily on rehashed content with small tweaks to make it feel fresh and new.

As announced, the content focuses heavily on lifestyle and pop culture topics and relies heavily on repurposed quasi-evergreen content from the show’s archives — both broadcast and digital.

Monday’s offerings included, for example, an interview with the stars of the 2019 movie “Racing in the Rain.”

The service uses original but recorded opens where “Today” personalities use carefully scripted generic tosses to blocks of content.

For example, in a “Hanging Out with Hoda” segment, “Today” co-anchor Hoda Kotb appears on camera referencing “some” conversations with “folks” — notice the lack of specificity — before the stream runs repeats of old interviews Kotb conducted.

At other times, the original in studio intros are kept, meaning that talent appear to shuffle around and “change” clothing frequently if one is to view the entire stream as a complete show (which it’s not).

For some segments, using the original anchor segments involves quick cuts or fades to eliminate references to lines such as “we’ll be right back” or other phrases that might not fit into the flow of the stream.

“Today All Day” also uses “clean” versions of the content and uses its own set of graphics.

It’s worth noting the stream is not focused on hard news and, at least from what has appeared so far, does not feature any live news or weather inserts — the network has its 24 hour streaming news service NBC News Now for that.

The show does infuse a bit of a newsy feel by including more recent segments from its “Good News Today” segments.

On Monday, the stream replayed a package about how a local restaurant served food to health care workers on the front line of the coronavirus pandemic — but did not make when, exactly, the event took place.

“Today All Day” does take commercial breaks, though for the debut they were mostly filled with single promos for the main “Today” show.

With 24 hours of time to fill, NBC can also afford to run longer packages and interviews on the service.

This does give the stream a decidedly different pace than at least the first hour of the show — which tends to be more news heavy. Instead, “Today All Day” gives off more of the feel of the later parts of the second hour and as well as the third hour (minus the host chat and news updates) — though perhaps even at a slower pace.