NBCU TV, Movie Businesses To Fund Peacock Growth

Growing Peacock is the No. 2 priority for Comcast in 2022 (growing broadband is No. 1), Chairman-CEO Brian Roberts told analysts in the company’s quarterly conference call this morning. “With over 300 million hours of content consumed on Peacock per month, the engagement with our platform has proven extremely valuable to advertisers,” he said. The number of monthly users — 24.5 million active accounts at the end of 2021 — is already at 75% of the company’s original projection for 2024, including 9 million who are paying for either limited commercials or no commercials.

Thus, spending is being ramped up for even faster growth, with profits from the rest of NBCUniversal easily covering a few more years of losses at Peacock.

Comcast CFO Mike Cavanagh, said: “Even with the relatively limited program slate, we’ve accumulated a level of success and MAAs [monthly active users], paid subs and engagement that is driving our decision to double our content spend on Peacock in 2022 to over $3 billion, with the goal of ramping domestic content spend to $5 billion over the next couple of years.”

For 2021, Peacock generated revenue of nearly $800 million and an EBITDA loss of $1.7 billion, including content expenditures of over $1.5 billion.

“We really believe that Peacock is not a separate business for us. It’s an extension of our existing business,” said NBCU CEO Jeff Shell.

“It’s a dual revenue stream. We are organized in our television businesses so we run all of them together as one business. We program together as one business, picking the right model for each of our pieces of content that maximizes that. So we think over time, that’s not just going to produce good growth on Peacock, but it’s going to lead to our TV business — as we hit that peak investment period on Peacock — returning to growth overall,” Shell told the analysts.

“We’re No. 1 on NBC, we’re No. 1 on news, our studio’s really strong. We have, in my opinion, the No. 1 content company in the world. And we’re using that strength with our business model to really play a different game in streaming,” Shell added.

For the fourth quarter of 2021, media revenues for NBCU were up 8.4% to $5.8 billion, with distribution revenue up 11% and advertising up 6%, despite a ratings decline and the lack of political advertising seen the previous year.

For the full year, NBCU media revenues rose 20.3% to $22.8 billion. Excluding the Olympics, the gain was 11%.

Adjusted 4Q EBITDA for the media segment was down 49.3% to $721 million and down 18% for the full year to $4.6 billion.