Even a World Cup 12 months couldn’t make Peacock fly.
NBCUniversal’s flagship streaming service surpassed 20 million paid subscribers within the fourth quarter of 2022—a 5 million addition—pushed by stay sports activities, movies and originals in Peacock’s finest quarterly outcome since its launch in 2020.
That also didn’t cease the bleeding. The price of investing in these new subscribers led to adjusted losses of $978 million for Peacock’s mother or father firm, Comcast NBCUniversal, for the fourth quarter. That’s up from the lack of $559 million in the identical time a 12 months in the past.
The corporate’s high executives nonetheless consider within the streamer, with chairman and CEO Brian Roberts pointing to its income reaching $2.1 billion.
“Our success was broad-based,” Roberts stated Thursday morning through the firm’s fourth-quarter earnings name, referencing sporting occasions such because the World Cup, the NFL and Premier League; its unique next-day broadcasts of NBC and Bravo content material; and originals.
The Comcast chairman and CEO expects Peacock’s subscriber cadence to observe its content material launches, touchdown extra closely within the second half of 2023.
Peacock’s full-year EBITDA losses climbed to $2.5 billion, in keeping with expectations. For 2023, the corporate is anticipating losses to hit $3 billion.
“As we’ve stated beforehand, we consider 2023 shall be peak losses for Peacock and from there steadily improved,” Mike Cavanagh, president of Comcast, stated.
Executives doubled down on their perception in Peacock, with Cavanagh calling the streamer “absolutely the proper technique” for the corporate.
“As eyeballs moved to a extra streaming universe, we like what we’re doing, and we had an exceptional 12 months getting paid [subscribers] to twenty million from lower than 10 [million] a 12 months in the past,” Cavanagh added. “We see this coming 12 months as the height 12 months in funding.”
The fourth quarter noticed the arrival of originals and movies together with Nope and Halloween Ends on Peacock. Nonetheless, executives largely credited subscriber positive factors to the corporate’s Spanish-language rights to the 2022 FIFA Males’s World Cup. These broadcasts streamed on the Peacock Premium tier and on Telemundo linearly.
“It’s very clear that we picked the proper enterprise mannequin given the place we’re, and it’s very clear that the content material power … is paying off on Peacock,” Jeff Shell, CEO of NBCUniversal, stated through the name.
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