On a call now with News Corp. COO Peter Chernin, NBCU CEO Jeff Zucker and just-announced NewCo CEO Jason Kilar and the JV partners are being more cautious about launch promises. Earlier this month, NBCU’s Beth Comstock told analysts the service would launch in September. When I asked about launch dates (today’s release said “later this year"), Chernin said the launch will come when the service is ready and that “might happen, might not happen” in September: “We don’t want to have the date first and back into it.”

Listening back to the call, Chernin’s response came when I asked if September was still realistic. More from his answer: “We’re moving full speed ahead ... We’ve made a lot of progress but we’re going to get Jason in there and get his arms around things and we’re going to keep moving ahead and we’ll launch when we’re prepared to launch with a world-class product.” NewCo. has about 30 employees now and just moved into offices in Santa Monica.

Advertising: NewCo has more than a dozen charter advertisers now; Zucker said some of those came through the upfront process. Chernin explained that the content creators can buy back inventory from NewCo and sell directly, which makes it possible to package NewSite inventory. Chernin: “For both ourselves and NBC, a big part of this upfront was selling additional digital rights to advertisers with the assumption being that both of us have packaged part of inventory from NewSite into those deals.”

Europe still not in the picture: One questioner wanted to know if getting EU approval was a sign that the JV planned to operate in Europe. No, it was a formality since both companies operate EU. The execs reiterated that for now this remains a U.S.-only operation. Chernin: “What we’re focused on is getting it launched in the U.S. and then we’ll take a look at whether it makes sense to expand it.”

New CEO: The emphasis on NewCo as a digital media business led them to a CEO with experience in building online environments for users. They already have people from the content side—and they already have the content. What they were missing was someone who could zero in on the customer/user experience or, as Kilar put it, “leveraging technology in a way that is intuitive and meaningful to customers.” The media execs insisted any suggestion they’d had a hard time getting people to come on because of the potential issues of working with, well, two major media execs/companies—were far from the truth.

-- Kilar also brings experience convincing studios and other content providers to come into Amazon for new services. 

What next: Hiring a CEO solves one major issue for NewCo although, granted, it’s not as if they’ve been standing still in the interim. Now, they need a name—as was acknowledged today—and visible results. As much as the talk today centered on getting it right first, there’s also pressure to get it right fast. With digital sales as part of the upfront, it’s hard to imagine that the partners will be thrilled if it’s not ready in time for the fall season.