Peacock Lifts NBCU Ad Sales, Streamer Narrows Losses

NBCUniversal’s streaming platform Peacock helped lift the company's overall domestic advertising to post a small gain in the fourth quarter.

The Comcast-owned company’s ad revenue posted a 0.4% hike to $2.65 billion.

Brian Wieser, media analyst at Madison & Wall, believes Peacock accounted for 25% of the company's national ad revenue.

However, he is concerned that without high political advertising at TV stations, core advertising for all of NBCU (including national TV networks and Peacock) declined by low single-digit percentages.

Wieser adds that according to Nielsen data, this should all be put in perspective to viewing: Peacock pulled in 1.5% of total TV U.S. viewing, with overall NBCU aggregated viewing from all its businesses at 9% of total U.S. TV viewing.

Peacock also helped lift the company’s domestic distribution quarterly revenue by 5% to $2.9 billion. As a whole, NBCUniversal’s media businesses witnessed revenue climbing 3.5% to $7.2 billion.

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For its part, Peacock significantly narrowed its loss to $372 million from $825 million.

NBC’s studio operations improved substantially -- 6.7% -- to $3.3 billion. NBCU’s results from its theatrical business from “Wicked” -- as well as “The Wild Robot” during the big holiday season -- were a key factor, with revenues 50% higher to $515 million.

Comcast domestic video customers lost another 311,000 to total 12.5 million. It dropped 389,000 in the year-ago quarterly period.

More alarming, the company’s domestic broadband business expanded its losses a year ago -- 139,000 -- to now total 31.8 million. A year earlier, the business dropped 34,000.

Broadband revenue was up 2% to $6.5 billion, with video revenue slipping 6% to $6.5 billion. Mike Cavanagh, president of Comcast Corp., said during the company's analyst phone call that intense competition for consumers' broadband business continues.

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