THB Sidebar: Comcast Q4
I wasn’t going to write about this, but the coverage of Comcast’s quarterly, released yesterday, is irking me… so a brief look…
Cable continues to show shrinkage… 18.2 million households down to 16.1 million over the course of the last year. Still, the drop was “only” 3.5% for the year and the division contributed a gross amount of $5.1 billion to the company. What the net is in the cable video business is protected by lumping their cable video revenues in with a wide range of other products Comcast offers at home, especially internet service, which is the single biggest revenue segment for the company. Interestingly, the cost of Comcast cable went $6.23 up per customer per month over the last year.
The NBC/Universal television business, broadcast and cable, without Peacock, generated $5.3 billion in the quarter.
Theatrical movies, including licensing of the existing library, generated $2.7 billion.
Parks generated $2.1 billion.
So why is seemingly every headline focused on Peacock, which generated a gross of $600 million last quarter?
To my eye, Comcast is being very clear that Peacock is not the current driver of this company. Period.
Yes, they lost $978 million on Peacock this last quarter. Everyone who is still in the first 5 years of streaming is losing money on streaming… which they all told us was going to happen from the beginning.
The monthly ARPU for Peacock, using the round number of 20 million subs they announced, is $11 a month… which is solid compared to, say, Paramount+ with $8.88 per month for their reported 46 million subs.
I’m not suggesting that Comcast will happily be so light on Peacock and so heavy on cable in 3 or 4 or 5 years. One presumes that much of what is now broadcast and cable revenue will be part of the streaming operation by then. But that will be, in function, a semantic change more than a literal one.
We all know the challenge… convert from “linear” to “streaming” without losing massively on the current low ad pricing for streaming… not to mention other long-held revenue benefits in “linear.”
Every segment of Comcast’s business is currently bigger, in terms of revenue, than Streaming, aka Peacock. And there is no indication that this is unintentional.
So why does everyone cover Peacock as though it is all that really matters… except for pointing out the not-unexpected losses in other segments?
Until tomorrow…