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Comcast CEO Brian Roberts reaffirmed the strategic course for NBCUniversal’s Peacock, revealing new metrics for the streaming service and signaling a plan to boost spending on programming.
During the media giant’s fourth-quarter earnings call, Roberts said Peacock’s premium tier now has 9 million stand-alone subscribers. Another 7 million subscribers come in via bundled offerings on Comcast’s platforms and those of other pay-TV distributors. Peacock Premium costs $5 a month with ads and $10 without them, but bundled customers generally pay nothing extra to get it. The service’s ad-supported basic tier is free for all viewers but has a more limited range of programming.
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The breakout of paid subscribers as a proportion of the monthly active user base of 24.5 million was the first one officially offered by Comcast since Peacock launched in mid-2020. The numbers came along with an overall positive quarterly report, as Comcast beat Wall Street estimates for revenue and earnings per share.
Average revenue per user (ARPU) for Peacock is approaching $10 when both subscriptions and advertising are combined, Roberts said. That is already ahead of the company’s initial projections of $6 to $7 in ARPU by 2024 — “and we haven’t even focused on paid subscribers,” NBCU CEO Jeff Shell added during the call.
“What we’ve learned so far is that we started with the right business model,” Roberts said. “With over 300 million hours of content consumed on Peacock per month, engagement with our platform has proved extremely valuable to our advertisers.”
Comcast plans to double spending on Peacock content to $3 billion this year, ramping to $5 billion and incurring EBITDA losses in 2022 of $2.5 billion. Some of the increased spending will be incremental and some is a reallocation from linear. The streamer’s peak investment year will be 2023.
As with WarnerMedia’s HBO Max, Peacock launched during the grim early phase of the coronavirus pandemic, joining Disney+ and Apple TV+ as efforts to close the streaming gap with Netflix. Deprived of original production and live sports, not to mention a major promotional engine in the pandemic-derailed Tokyo Olympics, it struggled to gain traction. NBCU opted to take bolder swings in order to keep pace with intensifying streaming competition, making deals to add the WWE Network, library jewel The Office and renewing Premier League soccer rights. Next month’s Winter Olympics in Beijing will have all of its events on Peacock, a major shift from last summer’s unpopular and selective carriage of the Tokyo Games.