Comcast/NBC/Universal’s streaming service, Peacock, lost a whopping $639 million in the first three months of 2024.
“Peacock narrowed its streaming loss to $639 million in the first quarter of 2024, with paid subscribers growing 55% year-over-year to 34 million,” reported the far-left Wrap. “But shares of the media conglomerate tumbled over 6% as it continued to bleed pay TV and broadband subscribers.”
“Narrowed.”
The Wrap even put “narrows” in the headline… “Peacock Narrows Streaming Loss to $639 Million in Q1, Hits 34 Million Paid Subscribers.”
So, yeah, Peacock is on pace to lose $2.556 billion — with a “B” — in 2024, but let’s go with “narrows.”
But just how “narrow” is that compared to 2023? Read on…
During the quarter, Peacock added 3 million subscribers. Its narrowed loss of $639 million in the first quarter, followed by peak losses of $2.7 billion in 2023. Executives have previously said they expect Peacock to have a “meaningful improvement” in losses in 2024. The service’s average revenue per user is around $10.
Oh, so Peacock is on pace to “narrow” its losses from $2.7 billion in 2023 to … … … $2.556 billion in 2024.
Wait, isn’t $2.556 billion basically a rounding error behind $2.7 billion? Or is Peacock run by a black illegal immigrant transsexual and enjoying the benefits of some of that DEI math?
The only good news for Peacock here is that in the last quarter of 2023, it lost $825 million, compared to $639 million this quarter. But still… Wow.
We haven’t even gotten to my favorite part…
Video revenue fell 6.9% year over year to $6.87 billion as the cable giant continued to bleed subscribers from cord-cutting. … The division lost 487,000 video customers for a total of 13.6 million and 65,000 domestic broadband customers for a total of 32.2 million, but gained 289,000 wireless subscribers during the quarter for a total of 6.87 million. Total customer relationships decreased by 166,000 to 52 million.
“Pay TV” is cable/satellite TV — and, for 15 years, I’ve been writing about this slow-motion calamity that the entertainment media wrist flicks and glides over.
Pay TV is the one-legged stool holding the entertainment infrastructure up. For decades, a hundred million American households were conned into paying a fortune for dozens of cable channels they never watched. Thanks to people canceling their cable and moving to streaming, that’s all coming to an end. BUT…
As we can see here, streaming is not coming close to making up for that revenue. Unlike pay TV, which ended up becoming an affirmative-action program for left-wing Hollywood where merit didn’t matter, with streaming, merit does matter. We only subscribe if we want to watch your content, whereas, with pay TV, we pay for your content even if we have never watched it; because we wanted Fox News or Turner Classic Movies or the local networks, we had to pay for your crap in those fascist cable packages.
And it’s not just Peacock bleeding billions. Other than Netflix, all the streaming services are losing billions as the Golden Affirmative-Action Goose that was pay TV dries up and dies.
The left-wing entertainment media glosses over this epoch to protect the stock prices of these conglomerates, who are their advertisers. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s happening and that it’s glorious.
Eventually, economic reality will force these streaming services to stop with the woke programming, the gay sex, and the left-wing lectures and produce stuff Normal People want to watch. Or, multinationals like Comcast can never change and write off two or three billion a year. Either way…
I’m fine with it.
UPDATE: This post had some math errors and has been updated to correct that error.
John Nolte’s first and last novel, Borrowed Time, is winning five-star raves from everyday readers. You can read an excerpt here and an in-depth review here. Also available in hardcover on Kindle and Audiobook.
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