Comcast declined to say how many viewers signed up for Peacock just before its streaming-exclusive NFL playoff game this month.
“We would expect to see an increase in paid subs,” Comcast president Mike Cavanagh said on the company’s 4th quarter earnings call Thursday.
Comcast said Peacock grew to 31 million paid subs in the fourth quarter, an increase of 3 million.
“We’re focused on retention,” Cavanagh said. “What’s important is both the subs that came in during the game and the engagement of the people that were already on the platform.”
Comcast paid $110 million for rights to the wild card playoff game. Nielsen said that 23 million people watch the wild card game between the Chiefs and the Dolphins, including those who watched on local stations in Kansas City and Buffalo.
Research company Antenna estimated that 2.8 million users subscribed to Peacock during the three days leading up to the game. Antenna called it the biggest subscriber acquisition moment it ever measured.
However, it is fairly easy for new customers to cancel subscriptions to streaming services, so Comcast will have to work to hold onto as many of those new customers as it can.
“Engagement and retention is really going to be focused on what's coming next,” Cavanagh said.
Peacock has already seen record levels of viewing hours in the days that have followed the wild card game, Comcast said.
Ted, Peacock’s new comedy, was the most-watched original series ever in its first seven days on the platform. And Season 2 of Traitors is Peacock’s biggest original reality launch in its first four days.
Big ticket items coming to Peacock are the Oscar nominated film Oppenheimer on February 16 and the summer Olympics from Paris.
"Now that we’re post-strike, you’ll see a number of Peacock originals and additional movies from the pay-one window that we’ve got with Universal,” which is the studio Comcast owns, Cavanagh said.
“At the scale we've gotten to, what's important is to keep people engaged with the platform and all the content that's there and not the wild-card game unto itself,” he said. “So the job is we'll get more people in the door and get everybody that's already in the door re-engaged with the platform.”
