Comcast Stock Falls, but Peacock and Sports Rights Provide Hope

One of the foremost U.S. companies for TV distribution and internet connectivity is finding content itself to be an increasingly critical pathway—with sports standing at the heart of that growing shift.

Comcast, the No. 2 pay-TV provider and major entity for broadband access, reported a company record Thursday for quarterly revenue, with its fourth-quarter haul of $31.9 million beating the comparable total from 2023 by 2.1%, as well as analyst projections. Net income, meanwhile, soared by nearly 47% to $4.8 million in the quarter.

Amid the superlatives, though, the totals revealed a major pivot point for the NBC Sports parent company. Comcast lost another 311,000 cable-TV subscribers in the quarter, leaving a new total of 12.5 million, and broadband subscriptions similarly fell by 139,000 to 31.8 million. 

The company, however, saw meaningful growth in several parts of its content business, including a 28% revenue surge with its Peacock streaming service to $1.3 billion, as well as improved results from its movie studio and theme park operations, plus its sports networks. 

Peacock has 36 million subscribers, flat from Comcast’s third-quarter results. The pathway to profitability for the service, however, continues to improve as losses there fell to $372 million, less than half the comparable total for the prior-year period and down from a $436 million loss in the third quarter. There was also no major churn following the subscriber boosts seen during and immediately after the Paris Olympics. 

Despite those gains, though, investors were still rather displeased with the cable and broadband subscriber losses, and sent Comcast stock down 11% Thursday to a 52-week low of $33.25 per share. 

Spin-Off Talk

Another notable statistic emerging Thursday regarding Peacock was that 98% of the viewing on the service involving NBCUniversal channels is from content not on cable channels it plans to spin off by the end of this year, and instead is dominated by NBC’s broadcast channel and Bravo. To that end, Comcast executives said the percentage was a further testament to the evolved corporate strategy.

“We’re not really running a Peacock-only strategy. We’re running a broadcast-plus-streaming strategy, and looking to optimize that over the years ahead,” said Comcast president Mike Cavanagh. 

Of course, standing at the top of that more focused media model is sports, particularly the NFL and Olympics. In the meantime, NBCUniversal outlets that will be part of the spinoff, like the Golf Channel, are already preparing for a newly separated reality.

“We’re definitely going to operate as two different companies, for sure, independent of one another,” NBC Sports EVP of golf Tom Knapp tells Front Office Sports. “We will continue to be who we need to be, and have synergies with NBC, but clearly, we will be an independent business.”

NBA Impact

Cavanagh, meanwhile, acknowledged the arrival of NBA rights to NBC beginning this fall, costing roughly $2.5 billion annually, may ultimately result in price increases at Peacock or the establishment of a higher subscription tier. Any such decisions, however, will not arrive until at least 2026.

“I would give us the full first season of NBA, into the second season, before we sort of normalize our businesses to handle the higher expense there,” he said.