Today Comcast reported its 2nd quarter 2023 earnings giving us an idea of how its cable and streaming services are doing. In Comcast’s Q2 earnings report released this morning, the company said it lost 543,000 video customer losses. That works out to almost 6,000 subscribers Every Day.
Peacock, one of Comcast’s plans to offset cord cutting reported adding 2 million new subscribers bringing its total subscribers up to 24 million. This all comes as Peacock is about to add a ton of new sports this fall thanks to a deal with the Big Ten for college football and basketball.
In total, Peacock lost $651 million during the 2nd quarter of 2023. This works out to over $7 million in losses for Peacock every single day.
“The consistent investments we’ve been making in our growth businesses continue to generate strong results and position us extremely well both now and into the future. Second quarter operational and financial performance was excellent and included a double-digit increase in Adjusted EPS and significant free cash flow generation,” said Brian L. Roberts, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Comcast Corporation. “This quarter contained a number of highlights and notable achievements. We not only continued to deliver solid revenue growth in our connectivity businesses but also expanded our Adjusted EBITDA margin at Connectivity & Platforms. We generated the best quarterly Adjusted EBITDA ever at Theme Parks, had the second-highest grossing animated film of all time in worldwide box office revenue with Super Mario Bros., and nearly doubled paid Peacock subscribers year-over-year. At the same time, we returned a healthy amount of capital to shareholders and maintained an enviable balance sheet. Our experienced and expert management team is executing at an exceptional level, and our long-term-oriented growth strategy is clearly working.”
This all comes as Comcast’s CFO Jason Armstrong says the changes Peacock is going through are costly. “It’s a costly pivot, and we’re right in the middle right now,” said Armstrong at the Deutsche Bank Media, Internet & Telecom Conference earlier this month.
Comcast said they expect to lose $3 billion this year as Peacock will undergo some changes.
Comcast is not alone in losing money on Peacock. Disney+ and Paramount+ are both reportedly losing money and don’t expect to be profitable until 2024 or 2025.
Right now, many Comcast customers can get Peacock for free. Now Comcast has announced that this summer, any customer getting Peacock for free will need to start paying.
To make the service more attractive, NBCUniversal recently announced that Peacock would be adding live news every morning from MSNBC and CNBC. This new block called “Morning News Live” will offer live feeds of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
“We’re continuously exploring ways to expand Peacock’s premium live content, and creating this unique morning news hub powered by trusted sources across NBCUniversal is something only Peacock can do,” said Brian Henderson, Executive Vice President, Programming, Peacock. “With ‘Morning Joe’ and ‘Squawk Box’ live each morning, not to mention ‘TODAY’ for our Premium Plus users, we’re giving subscribers a new reason to start each morning with Peacock.”
Comcast sees Peacock as a long-term investment and, for now, is happily burning money with the goal of making it profitable later.