• by Wayne Friedman , January 15, 2021

NBCUniversal’s Peacock will see steady subscriber and revenue growth this year and next -- rising sharply by 2024 to 52.1 million and $1.96 billion, respectively, according to estimates from Macquarie Research.

Currently, a big piece of revenue for NBC’s streaming platform comes from its free and subscription, ad-supported services.

Since it started in mid-July, during the six-month period Peacock has pulled in $296 million in revenue from 28.9 million U.S. subscribers, according to the financial research company -- with 26 million coming from Peacock’s ad-supported services, and the majority of that coming from its basic free, ad-supported option, Peacock.

NBC has three options: Peacock, Peacock Premium (subscription/ad-supported, $4.99/month), and Peacock Premium Plus (subscription/no advertising, $9.99/month).

In 2021, Peacock is estimated to hit $604 million in revenue -- $197 million coming from advertising and $407 million from subscription revenues.

Macquarie says advertising revenue will ramp up in the second half of 2021 “when the initial integration deals Peacock struck with core advertiser partners on integrated ads with NBCU fall away.”

Advertising revenue gains are expected to be “predominantly programmatic, given the ties they have with demand-side platforms like The Trade Desk, and NBCU’s One Platform ad sales system.”

NBCU’s One Platform enables advertisers to plan and buy advertising inventory across all of NBCU properties.

Parent company Comcast’s cable and broadband businesses -- X1, Flex and Xfinity -- are expected to achieve strong synergies from Peacock, according to the authors.

Comcast cable Flex and X1 subscribers currently get the Peacock Premium ad-supported/subscription service for free.

From this, Macquarie expects a rare increase in quarterly subscribers for Comcast’s cable operations -- with 514,000 additions, up 7% in the fourth quarter of 2020 over the year before and up 5% in growth in 2021.