Comcast Cranks Cash Into Peacock Streaming Service

Comcast Corp. plans to inject more money into its Peacock streaming service in the hopes of competing with Netflix, Hulu and some of the other companies fighting for viewers’ attention and eyeballs, executives said Thursday (Jan. 27), according to a Reuters report.

Peacock’s streaming service comes in three varieties: a free, ad-supported version, a $5-per-month option with “light ads” and an ad-free version that costs $10 a month.

Comcast Chief Executive Brian Roberts said on a call with investors on Thursday that the “vast majority” of Peacock’s paid subscribers use the $5 monthly service. The company plans to spend $3 billion on Peacock content this year, double its 2021 total, and $5 billion on domestic content in the next couple of years, he said, using NBCUniversal’s cash flow to fund the $2.5 billion loss in EBITDA.

Comcast had said in the past it would spend $2 billion on Peacock content in the streaming service’s first two years. Peacock had 24.5 million monthly active U.S. accounts at the end of 2021, up from more than 20 million at the end of July, with 9 million of those being paid subscribers.

The company posted a 4.5% rise in cable revenue to $16.41 billion in 2021, growing its broadband, video, voice and other services by 3.3% to 34.2 million accounts, but it gained only 212,000 broadband customers in the most recent quarter, down 60.6% from the same period in 2020.

Related: Bundled Streaming Services Could Be Answer to Consumer Burnout, Churn

In a recent conversation with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster, Jeremy Simon, vice president, global streaming partnerships at VUBIQUITY, said streaming bundles that include non-content services are also a key part of the future of streaming.

Standalone channels are still vying to be one of the roughly three streaming services in the average household, according to PYMNTS research, causing a deluge of marketing and cross-promotions.

All the players jumping into streaming may be confusing to consumers, Simon told Webster, but their approach offers clues about what’s coming next.

“The bundles we’re seeing in the streaming or [direct-to-consumer] space are quite different by partner, and we’re not seeing a ton of them,” he said. “There are pioneering [companies] like T-Mobile that offer a whole wealth of streaming services and offers to new customers from Netflix, Paramount Plus, Apple Plus, Google Storage.”