Comcast Execs Proud As A Peacock

The first quarter of 2022 was huge for NBCUniversal, since it was the first time the Comcast unit had ever had an Olympics and the Super Bowl in the same week. Also, revenues for the Peacock streaming service are now included in the Media segment, along with NBC, Telemundo and the cable networks.

“Media revenues increased 36% to $6.9 billion, including Peacock revenue, which grew more than five times year-over-year to $472 million in the quarter,” said Comcast Corp. CFO Mike Cavanagh in the company’s quarterly conference call with Wall Street analysts Thursday morning.

The Olympics and Super Bowl contributed an incremental $1.5 billion to Media revenue. “Excluding these events, Media revenues increased 6.9%, driven by both higher distribution and advertising revenue,” Cavanagh explained.

“Advertising revenue, excluding contributions from the Olympics and Super Bowl, increased 4%, reflecting higher pricing and a growing contribution from Peacock, which was partially offset by linear ratings declines,” the CFO told analysts. All in, including those big sports events, advertising was up 59.2% for the quarter.

Excluding the Olympics, distribution revenue increased 8.5%. All in, the gain was 21.6%.

“Media EBITDA decreased 21% to $1.2 billion in the first quarter, including a $456 million EBITDA loss at Peacock. Excluding Peacock, Media EBITDA decreased 7.7%, reflecting higher programming and production costs associated with our broadcast of the Beijing Olympics and Super Bowl, as well as higher costs driven by the return of our full primetime schedule, compared to last year when our schedule was impacted by COVID-19,” Cavanagh said.

Advertising was also higher for the Cable Communications segment of Comcast. For the first quarter, advertising grew 8.6% to $671 million, which Cavanagh attributed to gains in political ads, along with double-digit growth for Comcast’s XUMO ad-supported streaming service and advanced advertising. Excluding political, Cable advertising was up 6%.

Chairman-CEO Brian Roberts hailed continued growth for Peacock, which added four million paid subscribers during the quarter to end the quarter with over 13 million paid subscribers and 28 million monthly active accounts in the U.S. “Given the ebb and flow of our content slate, we do not anticipate seeing this type of growth every quarter, which has expanded our total paid subscribers by over 40%. So, we expect more modest subscriber gains until we get to the back half of this year,” Roberts told analysts.

He noted the NFL and other big sports events to stream this fall, new movies and original programming. “And for the first time, starting this fall, Peacock will be the exclusive home of the next-day NBC broadcasts,” Roberts said. The rights to that NBC content are currently at Hulu.

NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell reminded analysts that Peacock has four main programming areas: sports, movies, original shows and repurposed programming from NBCU’s linear networks. That latter hasn’t been implemented yet because of the Hulu deal, but beginning in September Peacock will become the next-day home of programming from NBC, Bravo and other cable networks. In answer to an analyst’s question, Shell said that move will have no impact on retrans deals, since the programming had already been streaming — but on Hulu rather than Peacock.

“Instead of going to Hulu to see The Voice the next day or seeing Real Housewives the next day, you’ll be able to see it exclusively on Peacock starting in September — and we’re pretty excited,” Shell said.