In what's become a right of passage in the world of media and entertainment, Comcast's NBCUniversal will unveil Peacock, its new video streaming service, during the company's investor day Thursday in New York.

Peacock is the last of the known major media streaming services to officially "launch," joining Disney+, Apple TV+, HBO Max and Quibi as subscription video products that will compete or are now competing against Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, CBS All Access and others.

Thursday's announcement will essentially close out phase one of the streaming era: product announcements and launch dates. Phase two will be figuring out how these services interact with each other and traditional bundled pay television.

Streaming services are theoretically future replacement products for pay TV — an anachronistic bundle of linear TV networks that cost somewhere between $60 and $100 per month. There's strong evidence suggesting the general public has begun a movement away from traditional TV toward streaming. About 80 million U.S. households still subscribe to some form of satellite or cable TV, down from a peak of close to 100 million roughly a decade ago, according to LightShed Partners, a technology, media and telecommunications research firm.

Then again, 80 million U.S. households is still a huge number. More Americans still subscribe to cable and satellite TV than Netflix, which has about 60 million subscribers, or any other streaming service.

The result makes this moment in time an awkward one for the innovation cycle. Disney, Amazon, AT&T, Comcast and Apple are among the largest companies laying the groundwork for a mass transition in media consumption, but their products also work as complements to traditional TV rather than replacements. Still, there's an assumption that streaming services will one day function as replacements, even if the end result is a bundle of streaming services that looks like a skinnier version of traditional TV with better user functionality that's available on all devices all over the world.

This pattern of innovation is fairly common, said Brian Hindo, a partner at strategy consulting firm Innosight, who works with media, technology and consumer clients. Innosight was co-founded by Clayton Christensen, author of the seminal business book "The Innovator's Dilemma," which details the typical effects of disruptive innovation.

Just as cellphones initially operated as complements to landline phones and mini mills were seen as niche manufacturing factories for low-quality steel, streaming services will be incomplete offerings until they reach scale, said Hindo.

"When disruptive products enter a market, they typically are worse in some meaningful way relative to traditional products," Hindo said. "Their appeal will initially be to certain segments of the market who are willing to accept trade-offs for new benefits."

At this juncture, the three new benefits for streaming services are lower price, new content and mobility, i.e., access to programming anywhere on any device. The drawbacks are lack of quality content, such as live sports, and a confusing array of options, rather than the one-bundle-fits-all approach of cable.

If streaming products can actually get to profitability — most of the major companies are predicting they will hit this point in three to five years — they will then be able to expand their reach and improve their offerings to accelerate the demise of cable TV, Hindo said.

Historically, publicly traded incumbents, such as Disney and NBCUniversal, have been poorly positioned to keep up with disruptors, said Hindo. They are too wedded to profitable models to purposefully innovate against themselves with niche products that come with disadvantages.

Then again, Disney and NBCUniversal know this. Their executives have likely read Christensen's book and other common business-school textbooks about how to properly pivot.