Peacock Has Just 9 Million Paid Subscribers

Streaming service is making $10 monthly per paid sub, including advertising

Anthony Michael Hall as Tommy Doyle in Halloween Kills, directed by David Gordon Green.
Universal Pictures

Peacock has “over 9 million paid subscribers,” Comcast chairman and CEO Brian L. Roberts revealed on Thursday. The streaming service is making a little less than $10 monthly per paid subscriber, including advertising, he added. We’ll save you the math: that’s $90 million per month in Peacock subscription and advertising revenue.

Most Peacock users have opted for the $4.99 ad-supported option (Peacock Premium) over the $9.99 ad-free option (Peacock Plus), Roberts said.

“Within these 24.5 MAAs [Monthly Active Accounts] are over 9 million paid subscribers approaching $10 in paid ARPU [Average Revenue Per Unit], which includes the advertising. And that is without much focus on paid subscriber growth,” Roberts said during a conference call following the release of Comcast’s Q4 earnings. “We have another 7 million highly engaged bundle subscribers from Xfinity and other top distributors who use Peacock every single month and currently receive Peacock Premium at no extra cost.”

So that’s 9 million paid, 7 million who don’t have to pay for the mid-level option, and 24.5 million monthly active accounts (there is also a free tier). We don’t currently have an update on what the company has previously referred to as total sign-ups, which would be a much larger number.

Comcast CFO Mike Cavanagh said on the call that the company will double its Peacock content spend for Peacock in 2022 to $3 billion. He sees the annual spend rising to $5 billion “over the next couple of years.”

Unfortunately, he also predicted a $2.5 billion EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization) loss for Peacock this year. In 2021, Peacock lost $1.7 billion.

Prior to today, the last update we got was when Peacock reached 54 million sign-ups by July 29, 2021, which was the day Comcast reported its second quarter financial results. At that time, Comcast also said the streaming platform boasted 20 million monthly active accounts.

Conveniently, NBCU’s Tokyo Olympics Opening Ceremony took place on July 23, meaning we were nearly midway through the Games at the time of that update. All events were carried on Peacock, which certainly led to a surge in sign-ups. The Tokyo Olympics began more than three weeks after Q2 ended. Therefore, the lion’s share of that Olympics sign-up surge likely took place in early Q3, but before the second-quarter’s earnings call.

Comcast had previously projected Peacock would have up to 35 million subscribers by the end of 2024.

Read Comcast’s fourth-quarter and full-year 2021 earnings here.

NBCUniversal’s quarterly revenue jumped 25.6% from Q4 2020 to $9.3 billion. While revenue at the company’s Media segment, which includes Peacock, increased 8.4%, a $559 million loss related to the streaming service provided a big blow to the bottom line.

Peacock’s $1.7 billion loss in 2021 was more than 2.5 times its 2020 loss of $663 million.

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