29 OCT 2021

The Tokyo Olympics powered an increase in profits for NBCUniversal

The Tokyo Olympics powered an increase in profits and revenue for Comcast’s NBCUniversal’s media business during the third quarter of the year, despite larger losses from its Peacock streaming service.

29 OCT 2021

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The Tokyo Olympics powered an increase in profits and revenue for Comcast’s NBCUniversal’s media business during the third quarter of the year, despite larger losses from its Peacock streaming service. During its Q3 earnings report, Comcast confirmed that Peacock lost $520 million in the quarter, up from $233 million a year ago. The streaming service revenue was $230 million, up from just $41 million a year ago. In the second quarter, Peacock lost $363 million on revenues of $122 million.

Nevertheless, the company announced a growth in sign-ups on the platform, although it did not provide details. “Peacock added a few million more subs,”  vaguely said Jeff Shell, CEO of NBCUniversal. The streaming service, which offers both paid and free options to customers, had 54 million sign-ups as of July.

At the same time, Comcast’s revenue went up 47.9% to $6.77 billion. Excluding $1.8 billion generated by the Olympics, media revenue went up 9.2% to $5.01 billion. Meanwhile, ad revenue went up 73%, largely thanks to the Olympics. The third-quarter net income nearly doubled to $4.04 billion, or 86 cents a share, from $2.02 billion, or 44 cents a share, a year ago.

●   ORIGINALS DEMAND SHARE

As Comcast reported its latest quarterly earnings, Parrot Analytics revealed how NBCUniversal and its various subsidiaries stack up in the battle for consumer attention. When looking at Originals Demand Share, NBC content fares quite well, with 6% share of the highly competitive US market for Q3 2021. This is good for second place among the competition, behind only Netflix at 7.7%, and ahead of fellow legacy brands CBS (5.7%) and ABC (5.1%).

However, streaming service Peacock is not being leveraged properly so far, as the service accounts for 6.5% of SVOD catalog demand demand share, and just 1.6% of digital original demand share in the United States. Meanwhile, Corporate Demand Share finds NBCUniversal in fourth place among US consumers with 10.6%, trailing its legacy media brethren such as Disney (20.1%), ViacomCBS (13.1%) and WarnerMedia (12.1%).