Key Points
- Peacock grew to 44 million subscribers in 2025, driven by live sports including NFL coverage and the return of NBA games.
- Despite higher revenue, Peacock’s losses widened to $552 million as new NBA rights increased costs.
- Comcast is shifting focus to streaming and premium sports, with Peacock bundled through Walmart Plus instead of holiday discounts.
Comcast executives say they are pleased with the performance of the company’s streaming service Peacock, which grew subscribers during its most-recent financial quarter but still has yet to turn a profit on its own.
During the company’s fourth quarter (Q4) and full-year earnings call on Thursday, executives noted Peacock grew to 44 million customers by the end of 2025, spurred by higher interest in premium sports programming like its National Football League (NFL) events and the relaunch of the “NBA on NBC” franchise, which involves double-header National Basketball Association (NBA) games during the week.
Peacock airs the entirety of Comcast’s slate of NBA games, including some that are exclusive to the streaming service (though they are carried on pop-up channels on a few cable and streaming providers like YouTube TV).
The streaming platform helped Comcast’s media segment earn $1.6 billion in revenue during Q4, but losses attributed to Peacock climbed to $552 million, compared to a loss of $372 million one year earlier. Those losses were largely attributed to the new NBA rights that Peacock enjoys. It wasn’t clear how many new subscribers came to the platform specifically to watch live basketball games over other sports.
“(Last year) was a year of meaningful progress for us,” Mike Cavanagh, the co-CEO of Comcast, said on Thursday’s conference call. “We moved with urgency to make decisive management, operational and structural changes, resetting how we run our businesses and how we compete all with a clear focus on positioning the company for sustained growth.”
The spin-out of Comcast’s cable networks business into a separate company called Versant will help the remaining properties operated under Comcast’s NBC Universal focus on “streaming, live sports and premium content,” Cavanagh said.
There are signs that Peacock’s growth has largely petered out. After a price adjustment on Peacock this summer, executives decided not to offer a Black Friday deal that lowered the price of Peacock Premium to a one-time fee of $20, which covered one year of access. That deal had been available during the holiday shopping season nearly every year since Peacock launched.
Instead, Comcast decided to forge an arrangement with Walmart that allows customers of Walmart Plus to unlock free access to Peacock Premium as part of their retail membership. Paramount Plus Essentials is also offered for free through Walmart Plus, though customers can’t subscriber to both services at the same time. Instead, Walmart allows its members to switch between Peacock Premium and Paramount Plus Essentials once every 90 days.
