Peacock is stuck in a rut, at least when it comes to subscribers: The streamer stayed flat with 41 million subscribers in Q2, the same number it reported in Q1, according to parent company Comcast’s Q2 earnings call on Thursday.
However, Peacock narrowed its losses to $101 million for the quarter, down from $348 million in the same period last year. In July, it hiked monthly subscription prices by $3 across its Premium Monthly and Premium Plus Monthly tiers. It also made up almost a third of the NBCU upfront commitments in a record cycle for the company spurred by its upcoming live sports portfolio.
Revenue for the streamer grew 18% in the quarter to $1.2 billion, despite Comcast’s media division, NBCU, seeing an overall domestic advertising revenue decline of 7%. (In its earnings report, the company said that this drop was “primarily due to lower revenue at our networks, partially offset by an increase in revenue at Peacock.”) And besides Comcast’s upcoming spin-off of its cable channels into a new company called Versant, which Mike Cavanagh, Comcast’s president, said on the call would likely happen later this year or early next, there may be further change afoot at NBCU’s other media properties, he hinted.
As the consumer trend of “moving from the linear ecosystem to the streaming ecosystem continues…we’ll have the chance to rebalance various programming commitments for Peacock and NBC at large,” he said. “It’s also a set of properties and assets that is going to be extremely attractive to the consumer and very well-designed to participate in any of the possible re-bundling of and re-aggregation of streaming services.”
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Get the ball rolling: Peacock has had some recent wins, like the immense viewership for Season 7 of Love Island USA, which became the platform’s most-streamed original season during its run, according to the company. Looking ahead, it’s got a notable sports content slate: Peacock will air NBA games starting in October. Next year it’s also got the Super Bowl, the FIFA World Cup, and the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics in its arsenal. (Besides having a record upfront, NBCU notched its highest upfront sports commitment to date: Its client base was up 20% as compared to last year.)
On the studio side, Comcast’s Universal Pictures saw a win in the quarter with How to Train Your Dragon, which has grossed over $600 million at the box office. Universal also has the Jordan Peele-produced horror movie Him and Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale coming up in September.
Overall Cavanagh sought to strike an optimistic tone about Comcast’s future on the call.
“When you look ahead now a couple of quarters down the road, after the Versant spin, we’ll then have a media business made up of NBC broadcast, Bravo, Telemundo, as well as Peacock, that are completely symbiotic, leveraging the strengths of the entertainment business,” he said. “That new NBC media segment is really strategically well-positioned to continue to compete…Having a strategy for the future that is going to serve customers in a digital way through Peacock; that wasn’t the case a mere four or five years ago.”
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