After years of publishing clips from his CBS late night talk show to YouTube, David Letterman is ready for his own 24-hour streaming television channel.
On Wednesday, Letterman’s production company, Worldwide Pants, announced a new partnership with electronics maker Samsung to launch a free, ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channel on Samsung TV Plus that includes more than 4,000 hours of video content from the CBS program “Late Show with David Letterman.”
The show aired on CBS from 1993 to 2015 under a licensing deal with Worldwide Pants, with the latter retaining the rights to distribute the show on TV and digital platforms after the CBS run ended. The same is true with Letterman’s NBC show, called “Late Night,” which aired from the 1980s to the early 1990s, with Worldwide Pants acquiring the right to Letterman’s early foray into late night talk TV.
The Samsung TV Plus channel, called “Letterman TV,” will feature classic bits like “Stupid Pet Tricks” and those iconic “Top 10” lists, interspersed with interviews with major celebrities spanning more than three decades.
“Dave’s show was the original viral video,” Walter Kim, the Executive Producer of Digital at Worldwide Pants, said in a statement. “As someone who worked for the entirety of The Late Show, it’s a thrill to help assemble and create programming around some of our favorite moments from the show, and with more than 4,000 hours from which to choose, the channel will continuously change.”
In true Letterman fashion, the talk show host and comedian quipped that he was “very excited about this” and that he can “watch myself age without looking in the mirror!”
Letterman TV will be offered on Samsung TV Plus in the United States, starting this week. The service is available on modern Samsung smart TVs, smartphones and tablets, and on the web via most conventional browsers. Fans will also be able to watch on-demand clips of the show via half-hour compilation episodes, the company said.
It wasn’t clear if Samsung intends to make the channel or the on-demand clips available outside the United States.
The launch of Letterman TV comes nearly two years after Samsung inked a distribution deal with Conan O’Brien to bring clips from his NBC and TBS late night talk shows to the streaming platform on an exclusive basis.
Samsung says it offers more than 3,000 channels around the world, though the company double-counts some channels that have regional variants in places like Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany and France.
