NBC Sports’ coverage of the Paris Summer Olympics served up massive ratings and a profit for parent company Comcast, as the 17-day event generated a record $1.906 billion in incremental revenue.
As revealed Thursday morning in Comcast’s third-quarter earnings report, NBCUniversal whipped up $1.432 billion in ad sales during its holiday in France, plus another $474 million in distribution revenue. While the company did not disclose how much of a profit it made over the summer, the rights fee for this year’s Olympics was $1.452 billion. In other words, Paris cleared $454 million before production costs and other expenses took their cut.
A good chunk of the distribution dollars were courtesy of the Peacock division, which added 3 million subscribers in the quarter, bringing the streaming service’s overall base to around 36 million customers.
The Paris Games averaged some 30.322 million viewers across all NBCU platforms.
Peacock posted an EBITDA loss of $436 million during the three-month period, down from $565 million in the year-ago period. Revenue at the streaming division jumped 82% to approximately $1.509 billion, up 82% from the analogous span in 2023.
Overall media revenue improved 37% to $8.231 billion. Excluding the contribution of the Summer Games, media dollars were up 5% to $6.325 billion on the quarter.
Comcast also disclosed that it is exploring a spinoff of its cable networks unit, a clutch of ad-supported channels that includes Bravo, MSNBC, CNBC, USA Network, E! and Syfy. Such a move would have a limited impact on the NBC Sports portfolio, as the bulk of the company’s live sports properties air on the NBC broadcast flagship and Peacock.
“Like many of our peers in media, we are experiencing the effects of the transition in our video businesses, and have been studying the best path forward for these assets,” Comcast president Mike Cavanagh told analysts on during the earnings call. “To that end, we are now exploring whether creating a new well-capitalized company owned by our shareholders and comprised of our strong portfolio of cable networks would position them to take advantage of opportunities in the changing media landscape, and create value for our shareholders.”
Cavanagh went on to say that Comcast was “not ready to talk about any specifics yet,” before adding that the company will alert investors as soon as it reaches “firm conclusions” on the matter.
“The reason we’re announcing here is that we want to study it, there are a lot of questions to which we don’t have answers,” Cavanagh said. “So we want to do the work, with transparency around it … We want our shareholders to understand what we’re willing to look at.”
Cavanagh also said that the company would consider developing streaming partnerships in a bid to help accelerate the growth of Peacock, a process that he characterized as “playing some offense.”
The musings over the cable nets comes as Comcast continues to up its sports spending. Under its 11-year rights deal with the NFL, the company pays north of $2 billion per season for its Sunday Night Football contract, and big Olympics payouts are coming due, with the fee to carry the 2026 Milan Olympics set at $1.026 billion (a record for a Winter Games), while Los Angeles will cost another $1.507 billion. NBCU is also on the hook for a new NBA deal that will make the league $2.45 billion richer every year through 2036.
On the pay-TV front, Comcast closed out the quarter with 12.834 million domestic video subs, which marked a loss of 1.661 million customers versus the year-ago tally of 14.495 million. The 11% decline is slightly less vertiginous than last year’s 13% drop; all told, Comcast has lost 3.748 million video subs since Q3 2022.
