Posts for 'Peacock'

First up this week, YouTube continued its strong ad revenue growth in Q2 2025, with revenue rising 13% to $9.8 billion, ahead of its forecast. There’s plenty of growth still ahead as Shorts gain traction, advertisers tap conversion opportunities and AI permeates both content and monetization. 

Meanwhile Samsung signed a number of creators to put original content on its Samsung TV Plus FAST service. But as we discuss, there seems to be a looming decision for creators whether they should simply focus on their YouTube channels as YouTube becomes increasingly dominant on TV screens. 

Last but not least, we dig into the challenges that both HGTV and Peacock are experiencing. 

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Ten years after Amazon launched Prime Video Channels, giving Prime users the ability to easily discover and sign up for subscription streaming services, Comcast has belatedly launched StreamStore, its own streaming app store. 

As we discuss, unfortunately for Comcast, Amazon dominates this space with 58% share, according to recent Antenna data. Even Roku, with its 90+ million users, only has a 6% share. As always in the Internet Economy there’s a cost to sitting on your hands too long. StreamStore’s ability to achieve meaningful share in this space seems unlikely.

Other topics in our grab bag this week: Jeff Bezos is considering buying CNBC, NBC is likely to launch a linear sports network including its Peacock rights, and traditional TV is still holding onto a large chunk of ad impressions, though it’s only decreasing from here. We explore all of these and more. 

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Peacock subscribers held steady at 36 million from Q3 to Q4, though up from 31 million a year ago. Importantly Peacock’s quarterly loss declined from $825 million in the year ago quarter to $372 million this quarter. Elsewhere at Comcast, the company lost 139K broadband subscribers in Q4, worse than the 34K loss a year ago.

We also discuss Fox’s increase in Super Bowl ad rates to $8 million, and new data showing how FAST apps built into the TVOS are garnering more attention.

Thanks to our sponsor this week, Looper Insights. Click to access their new report, “Streaming Forward: Trends Shaping Digital Entertainment in 2025.” Colin has the QR code on his site to scan for the report as well.

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Early returns show Olympics viewership is up strongly so far. But while many devoted fans watch the full-length events, many other more casual fans consume just the highlight clips - often after they search for them subsequent to hearing about a particularly exciting moment (e.g. the clutch pommel horse performance, the long match-ending runback in rugby sevens, etc.). Watching highlights can also help drive casual fans to watch full length. 

All this means that for a long duration event like the Olympics, solid strategy/execution highlight clips distribution is imperative. In today’s podcast Colin and I discuss how we’ve been impressed so far with NBC’s Olympics highlight clips distribution across Peacock and YouTube. We’re able to compare and contrast experiences because Colin’s only been watching on the former and I’ve only been watching on the latter.

We discuss NBC’s balancing act of seeking to build value in Peacock, its owned and operated property, while also recognizing and respecting the reality that YouTube is the number one video search destination for hundreds of millions of users, so it simply can’t be ignored. Finally we discuss the business model benefits of distributing on Peacock and YouTube. 

Overall NBC’s Paris Olympics clips execution is far superior to the last games, and provides lessons for others. Still, we see still further room to optimize, which we review toward the end. 

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Comcast reported Q2 ’24 results this week, including an update on Peacock, which cut its loss to $348 million in the quarter from $639 million a year ago. Peacock’s subscriber count increased from 24 million in Q2 ’23 to 33 million at the end of Q2 ’24, but that was actually down a million from the end of Q1 ’24. 

In this week’s podcast we discuss whether and when Peacock will turn the corner and become a scaled, profitable streaming service. Peacock is betting big on expensive sports to deliver, with the Olympics kicking off tonight, and a new multi-billion dollar NBA deal to be announced soon, validating our call for Peacock to "Go Big or Go Home" back in November, 2021.

Peacock was a very late entry to the streaming game, and according to MoffettNathanson, has lost at least $8 billion over the past 14 quarters. Colin and I explain why we aren’t convinced sports can carry the weight of Peacock’s turnaround, and agree that only time will tell. 

We then switch gears to discuss Netflix’s Q2 earnings and the company’s lagging ad-tier performance, which surprises both of us a bit. Veteran podcast listeners will recall that back in October, 2022 Colin and I expressed our optimism about the pending impact of paid sharing and the ad-tier. The former has been a monster success for Netflix, based at least partly on the expert execution of its rollout. The ad tier remains a work in progress but we remain confident Netflix will figure it out. 

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Earlier this week Comcast took the wraps off StreamSaver, its new streaming bundle available for Xfinity subscribers. For $15 per month, StreamSaver bundles Peacock Premium, Netflix Standard with ads and Apple TV+. If subscribed to separately the combined total would be $25 per month, as of July 1st when Peacock Premium’s price will rise to $8 per month. That means StreamSaver provides a bundled discount of $10 per month, or 40% off the standalone rates.

As Colin and I discuss, StreamSaver’s discount is in the same range as Disney’s Duo and Trio bundles, which fall between 35% and 44%. It also means that if Xfinity subscribers took both bundles, they would get 6 top streaming services - Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Apple TV+, Peacock and ESPN+ for $30 per month, or an average of $5 per month per service.

From our standpoint, all this seems really appealing, especially to budget-conscious consumers. Think for a moment about the vast selection of entertainment and sports programming across these 6 services - all for $30 per month, which is far less than it would cost to take a family of 4 to a single movie, for just 2 hours of entertainment.

But as we also discuss, these discounted bundles need to perform their critical function of reducing churn and extending subscriber lifetime value. With so many different decisions required by viewers about what bundle (if any) to choose, it’s gong to be challenging to pinpoint causalities and correlations, making the elusive goal of streaming profitability ever more opaque.

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This week we discuss the logic of Amazon shutting down Freevee, which Adweek reported, and Amazon denied. We see a number of pros and cons to the move. Meanwhile Nielsen said that YouTube was once again the number one streaming service used on CTVs, ahead of Netflix and everyone else. This was the twelfth month in row for YouTube and we explore the reasons behind it.

Finally the rumor mill is swirling that Peacock and Paramount+ may combine forces, and we dig into how it would benefit both entities.  

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NBCUniversal said that last weekend’s Chiefs-Dolphins wildcard playoff game was a big success, attracting an average audience of approximately 23 million viewers on Peacock. In this episode of Inside the Stream, Colin and I dig into key metrics of how to assess the game’s financial success to Peacock, specifically, how many incremental subscribers did the game add, and how likely are they to stay around and for how long?

Peacock reportedly paid $100 million for rights to stream the game and so getting a strong financial return is essential.   

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On this week’s Inside the Stream Colin and I first discuss the trend toward SVOD services being bundled with one another. We agree the approach makes sense to cut churn and increase the lifetime value of subscribers. Next, Peacock has hit 30 million paying subscribers, which we believe is a healthy milestone for the three year-old service, though its losses are in the billions of dollars.

Meanwhile, WB Discovery has launched 11 FAST channels on Freevee, and Colin shares his thoughts on why the company could be more aggressive with FASTs. Last up, Disney moved the needle on integrating Hulu by adding a tile in the Disney+ UI for a beta group of subscribers.

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In Q2 ’23 Comcast lost 543K domestic video subscribers, up from a loss of 521K a year earlier. In total, for the past 6 quarters, Comcast has lost almost 3.2 million subscribers, or nearly 18% of the 18.2 million subscribers it had on December 31, 2021, to bring it to just under 15 million currently.

On the brighter side, Peacock continues to make progress, adding another 2 million subscribers to reach 24 million. Comcast said some of Peacock’s gains are coming from Comcast video and broadband subscribers who lost complimentary access to Peacock.

Colin and I discuss these various moving pieces, along with the impact of the writers’ and actors’ strikes on both of the businesses.

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Disney reported its fiscal 2023 first quarter this week, the first since Bob Iger returned to the CEO role. While other parts of the business are doing reasonably well, for Direct-to-Consumer, which includes Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+, subscriber gains were weak and ARPU was down. Iger also shared that Disney will cut its content spending by $3 billion this year. For Colin and me, all of that makes Disney’s DTC future seem murky.

Disney also plans to lay off 7,000 employees and take a $5.5 billion charge, while also stating it intends to restore its dividend by the end of the year - all a big victory for Wall Street. The layoff continues a disturbing pattern by most large tech and media companies (a topic about which I do a mini-rant during the podcast, sorry) which has put CEOs' lack of accountability on full display and smashed any delusions anyone might have had about any sort of an employer-employee "social contract" still existing (again sorry, I digress)

The most meaningful quote from Disney’s earnings call on late Wednesday was when Iger said “…the streaming business, which I believe is the future and has been growing, is not delivering basically the kind of profitability or bottom-line results that the linear business delivered for us over a few decades.”

Nor will it ever.

As Colin and I discuss this week (and as we’ve discussed ad nauseam in the past), the linear business model was based on the pay-TV multichannel bundle, which was the very definition of artificial economics. In the bundle, lots and lots of channels were delivered for a single price. The bundle’s monthly price steadily increased over the years as broadcast and cable TV networks raised their carriage fees paid by pay-TV operators.

The “elephant in the room” was that most pay-TV subscribers watched only a handful of TV networks, and yet paid for ALL of them. By far the biggest beneficiaries of pay-TV’s artificial economics were sports networks, with ESPN at the very top of the list. I first wrote about the “sports tax” 12 years ago in “Not a Sports Fan? Then You're Getting Sacked For At Least $2 Billion Per Year.” Things have only gotten worse for non-sports fans since. However, with streaming’s rise, the elephant is now fully visible, and has driven cord-cutting to record levels.

And just as the Internet has ruthlessly rationalized the economics of practically every other industry, it is now doing the same to the TV industry. The Internet allows zero room for artificial economics and anyone who violates this precept is an ostrich with their heads fully underground. Iger understands this, and his quote should fairly be seen as a signal to Wall Street that Disney is extremely unlikely to ever achieve historical financial performance in its TV businesses.

As if all of that weren’t enough, Iger then went on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” yesterday and told David Faber that “Everything is on the table…" with respect to Hulu’s eventual ownership resolution (reminder, Disney has a deal in which Comcast can force Disney to buy its 30% stake for a set minimum price that would translate into around $9 billion).

Iger’s comments basically turned Hulu into a hot potato. Really dedicated VideoNuze readers will recall that almost 5 years ago, in March, 2018 I wrote “Why Comcast Should Take Control of Hulu.” Then, subsequent to Comcast’s Peacock reveal in January, 2020, I followed up with “Quick Math Shows Comcast Missed Out On Almost $6 Billion in Revenue By Not Buying the Rest of Hulu.”

Instead, Comcast/NBCU launched Peacock and will have lost over $5.5 billion on it just between 2022-2023. If Comcast does come back in and buy Disney’s 70% stake in Hulu it will rank as the #1 irony in all the years I’ve been in the industry.

And it would make Disney’s DTC future even murkier still.

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Welcome to this week’s edition of Inside the Stream, the podcast where nScreenMedia’s Chief Analyst Colin Dixon and I take listeners inside the world of streaming video.

This week Colin leads off with highlights of smart TV innovations announced at CES. Then we discuss why Peacock streaming every moment of every event of the upcoming Winter Olympics is a big win for the service and also a milestone decision for parent NBCUniversal.

Finally, HBO and HBO Max ended the year with nearly 74 million subscribers, which we both shows clear momentum and how they’re moving past the decision to withdraw from Amazon’s Channels programs earlier this year. HBO Max is one of few subscription services that doesn’t need Amazon’s distribution strength.

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Yesterday Peacock and NBCUniversal announced that every minute of every live event at the upcoming Winter Olympics from Beijing will be streamed on Peacock. In addition, full replays of all competition will be available on Peacock immediately upon conclusion. Peacock viewers will also have access to the Opening and Closing ceremonies, the studio shows and medal ceremonies.

The announcements are smart moves and allow Peacock to clearly communicate and promote that all events will be available on the service. It’s a big improvement from last summer’s Olympics, which had incomplete coverage on Peacock and where replays and clips of concluded events sometimes were delayed and/or showed up on YouTube prior to being posted on Peacock itself. The execution fell short of many Peacock viewers’ expectations.

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Welcome to this week’s edition of Inside the Stream, the podcast where nScreenMedia’s Chief Analyst Colin Dixon and I take listeners inside the world of streaming video.

On Comcast’s Q3 ’21 earnings call, management was vague about how Peacock is performing. In Corporate America, not highlighting numbers is typically a sign that things are not going as well as hoped and/or the numbers are not as impressive, comparably speaking, as those of competitors. A round of speculation about Peacock’s performance and what might happen next has ensued.

On this week’s podcast, Colin and I try to explain what we think is happening. The hard truth for Peacock is that it came to market very late and that it is competing against well-funded and highly aggressive competitors which are spending heavily on originals and on promotions - a commitment that Comcast/NBCUniversal have not publicly committed to match. Another issue - at least relative to Paramount+/Showtime, which gained 4.3 million subscribers in Q3 - is that Peacock doesn’t include NBC’s linear feed, and also doesn’t specialize in mature content, which has a strong draw. These two benefits (and “Star Trek”) have no doubt helped Paramount+/Showtime. Yet another issue is that popular NBC programming continues to be available in Hulu.

All of these factors, and others, are limiting Peacock’s appeal. As if that wasn’t enough, Comcast has mixed incentives related to Hulu, because it still has a 30% stake that is getting more valuable by the day, as Netflix stock hits new highs. Comcast is financially disincented from harming Hulu by pulling programming to help Peacock (all of this would have been moot if only Comcast had acquired Hulu when it had the chance back in 2018). Comcast has missed out on billions in additional revenue and value creation.

In short, Comcast/NBCU are now facing a dilemma with Peacock that can be boiled down to: Go Big or Go Home. Either commit to spending what's required to compete effectively (either at the AVOD or SVOD level), or recognize Peacock is going to keep treading water and will likely never break out. It’s a tough decision, but it reflects the penalty late entrants face, especially when squaring off against competitors like Netflix, Amazon, Disney, HBO Max, etc.

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Welcome to this week’s edition of Inside the Stream, the podcast where nScreenMedia’s Chief Analyst Colin Dixon and I take listeners inside the world of streaming video.

Rather than focus on just one story this week as we usually do, today we do segments on 5 different stories that caught our attention. First we pick up on last week’s podcast about the dustup between YouTube TV and NBCUniversal. The companies avoided going over the cliff together and managed to extend their relationship. But it is a harbinger of more fights between networks and virtual (and traditional) pay-TV operators as the size of the pie continues to shrink due to cord-cutting.

Then Colin and I have a spirited debate about Google’s Fiber TV, which is being retired, and the broader question of whether Google Fiber’s 1 gigabit per second broadband service is a worthwhile product offering (Colin thinks it is and I think it isn’t, and I haven’t since it launched way back in February, 2010, see “Google’s Fiber-to-the-Home Experiment Could Cost $750 Million or More.” Also see "Google Fiber is Out of Synch With Realities of Typical Consumer Technology Adoption" from July, 2012 and "No Surprise, Google Fiber is Falling Short of Expectations" from August, 2016.)

From there we discuss the steep drop in L7 TV ratings that has continued in the first week of this Fall season. But even at these depressed levels, I assert that the most popular broadcast TV shows like “NCIS” still draw audiences that may likely be bigger than the first 7 days following the drop of a popular show on a big SVOD service like Netflix. Related, we discuss new Kantar data on SVOD churn in Q2. For more insight, have a look at my post from November, 2019, “Will Spinning Video Subscriptions Become a Thing?”

Finally, there’s a game of musical chairs happening in our industry and this week’s move by Kelly Campbell from president of Hulu to president of Peacock is just the latest example. We discuss why these executives’ shuffling matters to all of us as consumers.

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Welcome to this week’s edition of Inside the Stream, the podcast where nScreenMedia’s Chief Analyst Colin Dixon and I take listeners inside the world of streaming video.

Colin leads off the discussion this week, explaining why he believes that Peacock’s Olympics coverage has been a missed opportunity for the fledgling streamer. In particular, Colin notes that even for paying Peacock subscribers, marquee events are not only not available live, they are not even being made available immediately upon their conclusion (note I’m deferring to Colin on this, because as a former Boy Scout, I preemptively chose to record ALL Olympics events in YouTube TV, so I’m not watching anything on Peacock).

Colin is highlighting a crucial point - that for non-pay-TV households, which have multiplied by millions since the 2016 Rio Games, especially among younger viewers - Peacock has fallen short of its potential to meet viewers’ expectations and fully resonate. We have a spirited debate about why this has happened, and what to expect going forward.

Notwithstanding all of this, Comcast reported robust Peacock sign-ups yesterday in its Q2 ’20 earnings, up 20 million to 54 million (though still no word on how many are actually paying). It was also a strong quarter for both broadband and pay-TV. But we discuss what role pay-TV is going to play for Comcast in the wake of last week’s announcement to add Hulu with Live TV for broadband/Flex users (and my forecast that YouTube TV availability is likely just ahead).

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Yesterday’s news that Universal Pictures will release certain of its 2022 movies on Peacock no more than four months after their theatrical premiere was just the latest move by the owner of both a studio and a streaming service (in this case Comcast) to accelerate the demise of going to a theater to see a movie.

Universal’s move shouldn’t have surprised anyone. Back in April, 2020, in the early days of the pandemic, Universal decided to release “Trolls World Tour” as a digital rental to mitigate the closure of theaters. That touched off a highly public war of words with AMC Theaters’ head Adam Aron, who threatened to no longer carry Universal’s movies. Aron and NBCU head Jeff Shell ultimately buried the hatchet, signing a new deal that compressed the theatrical window from 90 days to 17. Aron may have gotten the last laugh when AMC’s stock unexpectedly got caught up in the meme frenzy and the company raised over $1.2 billion by issuing new shares over the past few months.

Of course, Universal is following a playbook being run by other cross-owned studios/streaming services. Disney has simultaneously released a number of its movies in theaters and on Disney+, experimenting with the premium rental model. ViacomCBS is compressing the theatrical window for Paramount movies to get them onto Paramount+ as quickly as possible. And of course WarnerMedia set off a firestorm back in December, ’20 when it abruptly announced all of its 2021 Warner Bros.’ slate would be simultaneously released on HBO Max (that decision was reversed for the 2022 slate).

Taken together, it’s pretty clear that studios are delicately, yet aggressively, prioritizing their streaming services over theatrical, irrespective of whatever soothing assurances studio executives continue to offer about the importance of the theater experience to assuage chain owners. But in reality, the studios’ moves are just one of at least 5 reasons why going to the movies is facing an irreversible demise as streaming upends every corner of the media and entertainment industry.

Read the 5 reasons

Over 50% of the viewing on Comcast’s Flex streaming TV device is free, ad-supported, according to an update Comcast shared this morning. Comcast didn’t identify viewing shares by specific services, but said four services - Peacock, Xumo, Pluto and Tubi - were “routinely among the most viewed apps on the platform.”

Comcast offers the Flex box for no extra charge to its 31 million Xfinity broadband users and said it had over three million Flex boxes deployed as of March. Flex users also get free access to Peacock Premium, the $4.99 per month ad-supported tier that includes all Peacock content, including all seasons of “The Office” which is Peacock’s most valuable content and gets significant promotion in the app. Comcast also noted its “content forward design that puts free programming front and center.”

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The U.S. SVOD market has undergone significant fragmentation over the past two years as new services have launched, according to the Q1 2021 Growth Report from Antenna, an SVOD insights provider. In Q1 ’19, Netflix and Hulu together accounted for over three-quarters (78%) of all SVOD subscriptions. But two years later, in Q1 ’21, their combined share fell to just over half (51%), with Disney taking 17%, HBO Max 11%, Paramount+ 7%, Starz 6%, Showtime 4% and discovery+, Peacock and Apple TV+ all at 2%.

Antenna didn’t report Amazon Prime Video numbers. Amazon said in its Q1 ’21 earnings report that 175 million Prime members have streamed TV shows and movies in the past year, though it didn’t provide any breakdown of U.S. share vs. rest of world.

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At its ONE21 developer conference this morning, NBCUniversal announced plans to launch its NBCU Audience insights Hub, which will contain all of its first-party audience data. The “proprietary data clean room” will give authorized partners permission to run restricted queries across their and NBCU’s audience data without exposing users’ personally identifiable information.

Using the NBCU data, partners will be able to discover overlaps in their audiences to drive better targeting and cross-platform campaign planning. Partners will gain access to NBCU’s linear TV APIs and certified reach measurement models to improve efficiency and effectiveness. NBCU plans to add to its measurement capabilities so that partners can do their own self-service multi-platform attribution. The clean room framework is being powered by Snowflake and VideoAmp is the first measurement partner to be integrated.

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