Peacock has steadily grown its audience and its brand in the U.S. over the past year and half and now the service is ready to go international with help from Sky.
During Comcast’s earnings call this week, the company announced its ad-supported streaming service will be available later this year to nearly 20 million Sky subscribers in Europe. Like in the U.S. on Xfinity X1 and Flex, Peacock will be offered at no additional cost on platforms including Sky Q, Now and Sky Ticket for customers in the U.K., Ireland, Germany, Italy, Austria and Switzerland.
Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said the launch will benefit Peacock by unlocking incremental advertising revenue, by growing the Peacock brand and content on Sky’s established platforms, and by directly monetizing programming investments.
“The decision to make Peacock the anchor tenant on Xfinity’s X1 and Flex platforms for its domestic launch has been a key driver of brand awareness, scale, consumption and promotion, and we see a similar opportunity with Sky,” he said, adding that Comcast is working on finalizing more programming and distribution agreements for Peacock outside of its Sky markets.
The Sky launch likely won’t add to Peacock’s paid subscribers in a meaningful way but it will almost certainly provide a significant boost to the service’s user base and advertising revenue. The launch will work in tandem with the Olympics and Universal films pay 1 window deal to kickstart growth for a service that came into the world in 2020 without its marquee launch event nor much content to speak of.
But even with all that, MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett said there’s still a broad consensus that Peacock is too small today to be positioned for real success.
“It is at best a question mark, and a very big one,” he wrote in a research note.
Comcast has been tied to several M&A rumors involving companies like Roku and ViacomCBS as it looks to catch up to what peers like Disney and WarnerMedia are achieving in the streaming video industry. Roberts said his company will consider partnerships to enhance its international streaming position but he threw cold water on any idea of buying or merging with another company.
“We don’t need M&A. We have a majority broadband-centric company and we like the mix,” he said while stating that Peacock is probably the fastest growing streaming service in the U.S. after notching a 50% quarterly increase in monthly active users.
Peacock now has now has 54 million sign-ups and more than 20 million monthly active accounts (MAA). That’s significantly higher than the 42 million sign-ups and approximately 14 million MAAs that the service had in April. There may not be a splashy M&A deal in the works for Comcast, but the Sky launch will help see to it that those Peacock numbers keep accelerating in the near-term.