In its corporate filings for the fourth quarter of the 2025 calendar year, US telecoms heavyweight Comcast revealed that its Peacock OTT streaming service (which falls under the NBCUniversal business unit) lost over $500 million in the three-month period.
The total losses amounted to $552 million, up 48% on the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2024 ($372 million), and came despite Peacock also announcing double-digit percentage year-on-year subscriber and revenue growth.
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Overall revenue for Peacock over the quarter sat at $1.6 billion (+23%), while subscriber numbers burgeoned to 44 million (+22%), but was contrasted by the loss of $522 million, much of which comes from the onset of payments towards the streamer’s new $2.5 billion per year media rights deal with basketball’s elite NBA, which came into effect with the start of the 2025-26 season.
The NBA rights acquisition came with a marked increase in advertising revenue, and similarly an uptick in viewership across Peacock and the NBC linear networks, which began the season with the most-watched NBA opener since 2011.
NBC’s coverage of prime-time Sunday-night NFL fixtures (which includes Peacock) also remained strong through the period, averaging 23.5 million viewers per game, illustrating the strength of the company’s sports offering.
Despite this, Peacock – like most OTT platforms in the US – has never turned a quarterly profit. In Q2 2025, the company managed to cut its quarterly losses as low as $101 million, but even this latest $552 million loss is an improvement on 2023, when the company lost more than $565 million in every quarter.
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By GlobalDataIn the end, Peacock’s revenue still contributed to a media segment that overall generated $7.6 billion across the quarter, inclusive of linear networks both domestic and international, with a loss of $122 million.
Full-year revenue at Peacock stood at $5.4 billion (+10%) across 2025, and the streamer cut its annual loss by $700 million (inclusive of the NBA rights).
On Peacock, Comcast chief financial officer Jason Armstrong said the streamer had “reached meaningful scale”, adding: “In 2026, we expect Peacock losses to meaningfully improve again.”
One factor that will no doubt help move the needle is the myriad of major sports events NBC will broadcast throughout the year.
Across 2025-26, NBC will showcase three tentpole events – the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, soccer’s 2026 FIFA World Cup (via Spanish-language network Telemundo), and the NFL Super Bowl.
Advertising sales for coverage of these three events are already strong, with NBC having sold out of Super Bowl advertising inventory as early as September and sold out of Winter Olympic inventory in early January, setting a revenue record in the process.
