Photo: Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Macy’s Inc.
There are certain headlines you usually want to avoid when you’re trying to launch a relatively new streaming service, a period when nothing is as important as convincing users, discouraged at the thought of signing up for another login, that you have the vital content they cannot live without. You want to look vibrant. You want to look explosive. You don’t want to have a headline that says, “Wow, Peacock hasn’t added any new paying subscribers in the last quarter.”
Anyway: Peacock didn’t add any new paying subscribers in the last quarter. Wow!
And while this news is clearly bad, it’s not necessarily the worst piece of information to come out today about the NBC-adjacent streamer: The service also apparently lost a million monthly active accounts overall, suggesting that even some of the people who are putting on. for Peacock they don’t bother using it.
That’s per Indiewire , reporting today on an earnings statement from Peacock’s parent company Comcast, which tried to put a slightly sunny sheen on the whole thing by claiming that “Going from zero to 13 million paid subscribers in a couple of years at Peacock is a huge success.” Which is a completely true statement, which nevertheless takes a bit of the cadence of “The first 95 percent of the Titanic’s maiden voyage was a very smooth ride.”
However, the peacock is not ready to sink beneath the waves. Admittedly, it’s been a pretty rough time for streaming in general right now, with people mostly crawling out of their quarantine bunkers (even though the pandemic is still over, you know). Netflix has also been reporting declines and losses in recent quarters, though as Indiewire points out, it’s losing a couple of million of its 70-some million subscribers, rather than being stuck around 13 million. Peacock is also committed to outside events in a way that some of its competitors are not: The service drew many viewers for its share of NBC’s Olympics coverage last quarter, as well as the Super Bowl. The second quarter had far fewer of these big events to drive subscriptions, though Comcast is projecting optimism that the arrival of Jurassic World, Rise Of Gru and other blockbusters on the service could help things in the third quarter .
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None of this is to wish the Peacock any harm; Like all streamers, it has some stupid stuff and some genuinely great shows – we’d love to see Rutherford Falls or Girls5Eva disappear just because of marketing issues or other mismanagement.