• by Wayne Friedman , July 27, 2023

Although NBCUniversal's Peacock grew subscription and advertising revenue by 85% in the second quarter to $820 million, overall advertising at NBCUniversal was down nearly 5% to $2.03 billion.

The decline was driven by Comcast-owned legacy NBCUniversal TV networks and other platforms. 

Since the fourth quarter of 2022, all legacy TV networks have been subject to weakness in the scatter TV advertising market -- where brands buy and run media closer to airtime.

For its part NBC's streaming service Peacock posted widening losses -- to an $651 million in adjusted cash flow -- earnings before interest taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) -- from $467 million in the prior year before. Comcast says higher programming costs continue to affect Peacock.

Peacock subscribers nearly doubled versus that of a year ago -- to 24 million.

At the same time NBCU witnessed higher domestic distribution and overall international network revenue -- up 2.2% to $2.6 billion and 6.7% to $1.04 billion respectively.

All that pushed NBCUniversal’s overall revenue for its media businesses to flat for the period at $6.2 billion. NBCU studio’s business also posted mostly flat results -- down 1% to $3.1 billion. 

Though studio content revenue sales were down nearly 20% to $1.8 billion, theatrical revenue -- mostly from strong results to “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” and “Fast X” -- grew nearly 66% to $913 million. Theme-park revenues spiked 22% to $2.2 billion.

Sister business -- Comcast pay TV video operations -- posted a 543,000 decline in subscribers similar to that of the prior year period -- to 14.99 million subscribers. 

Video revenues dropped 6% in the period to $7.4 billion. Local advertising revenue for Comcast’s pay TV systems were also down -- sinking 11% to $993 million. 

The positive side for Comcast remains its rising domestic and international broadband and wireless, growing 8% to $8.3 billion.  This was helped by higher pricing for broadband offsetting slower business overall ---  total domestic broadband customers declined slightly, 19,000, to 32.3 million.

Company-wide results for Comcast improved by nearly 2% in revenue to $30.5 billion with adjusted cash flow (EBITDA) 4.2% higher to $10.2 billion. Overall results beat expectations.

Mid-day Thursday trading of Comcast's stock grew 7% to $45.87.