Peacock, the streaming service of Comcast’s entertainment unit NBCUniversal, has posted a widened fourth-quarter loss of $552 million, compared with $372 million in the year-ago period.

Comcast, which announced its latest financial results on Thursday, put the higher Peacock loss down in part to the launch of the NBA and an exclusive NFL game. Due to its sports and entertainment lineup, Peacock posted $1.6 billion in total revenue, up from $1.3 billion the year-ago quarter. The streamer recorded 44 million paying subscribers, compared with 41 million at the end of the third quarter and 36 million a year ago, the company said Thursday.

Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong on a morning call said Peacock had “reached meaningful scale,” and “in 2026 we expect Peacock losses to meaningfully improve again” as the media conglomerate continues to navigate a disrupted landscape for traditional Hollywood studios. Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts discussed the wider market backdrop for Peacock amid continuing industry consolidation that had the company eyeing and then calling off any run at Warner Bros. Discovery.

“In terms of Warner Bros., what can you say, it’s still underway, obviously. We saw an opportunity to see if we could build value for Comcast shareholders, looking at their international reach, and would have been additive. But once it looked like all-cash, we were just not interested in these values stretching our balance sheet to do something like that,” Roberts explained.

He added Comcast is taking a wait-and-see stance as the face off between Netflix and Paramount for WBD had unleashed another round of industry consolidation: “A lot of companies are (asking) what does this mean to me? And there’s a lot of conversations on whether there are opportunities to build value, and we’re always open to that. So we’re looking at ways to creatively compete, succeed and go into a part of the business that is perhaps not the same everybody else and I think we’re doing a great job of that.”

The Source: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/peacock-loss-subscribers-44-million-1236488224/