A seasonal dearth of live sports content contributed to a mixed bag for Comcast’s streaming service, as Peacock subscribers remained flat at 41 million, while losses narrowed to $101 million in the second quarter of 2025. While that marked a not-insignificant improvement compared to the $348 million hit the platform took in the year-ago period, Comcast’s latest results pushed Peacock’s cumulative losses past the $10 billion mark.

The DTC service boosted revenue by 18% to $1.2 billion in the April-June period, and Comcast executives on this morning’s earnings call said they were confident that NBC Sports’ new NBA rights package will drive subscriber growth at the unit. Two weeks ago Peacock upped the monthly fees for both its ad-supported and commercial-free plans by $3 per month.

“The impact of this price increase, combined with [our] strong upfront results … helped position us as we launch the NBA,” said Comcast president Mike Cavanagh, who went on to note that the league’s return to NBC will trigger “higher sports programming expenses” in the fourth quarter and beyond. NBC’s 11-year pact with the league will cost it $2.45 billion per season, although the company believes that the positive impact on advertising revenue and Peacock sign-ups should go a long way toward diluting those expenses.

As the sleepy sports calendar did its usual job of throttling Peacock’s momentum on the customer-acquisition front, the losses at Comcast’s legacy cable unit were similarly predictable. The operator ended the quarter with 11.8 million video customers, which marked a sequential loss of 325,000 hook-ups and a year-over-year defection of 1.43 million subs. Over the past 12 months Comcast has lost another 11% of its pay-TV base to the ravages of cord-cutting, a churn rate that was only slightly less vertiginous than the 12% hit the company took in Q2 2024.

The defections have really piled up in recent years, with Comcast shedding 3.21 million video customers, or 21% of its base, since the analogous period in 2023, while nearly one-third (31%) of its subs have dropped the bundle in the last 36 months. Five years ago at this time, Comcast had 20.4 million video customers; since then, 8.6 million have ditched their traditional cable subscriptions.

Comcast reported its latest round of cable losses just days after Charter managed to reduce its own quarterly churn rate to -5%.

Media revenue rose 2% to $6.44 billion, as Peacock’s intake helped offset the impact of a 7% decline on the domestic advertising front. Sales at the stateside media channels were down $143 million from the year-ago period, to $1.85 billion.

NBCUniversal closed out its 2025-26 upfront cycle with what it characterized as “record” advanced commitments from advertisers, with the new NBA inventory contributing to a 20% boost in new clients. The media unit saw unprecedented demand in this year’s bazaar, as marketers scrambled to stake out a claim in NBC’s sports portfolio, which in the next year alone will feature the Super Bowl, the Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics and the FIFA World Cup on the Spanish-language outlet Telemundo. Comcast said Thursday that Peacock sales represented over one-third of the company’s upfront dollar volume.

Later in the call, Comcast reiterated that the spinoff of the Versant cable channels should wrap by the end of this year or the start of 2026. The Versant transaction cost the parent company $110 million on the quarter. Meanwhile, executives were characteristically mum on the recent chatter that Comcast is considering the launch of a new cable channel devoted to sports—a development that’s begun brewing just four years after NBCSN was shuttered. While the idea is in the larval stage, the upshot is that the new entity would serve as a means for NBCU to simulcast live sports that are otherwise exclusive to Peacock.

On the broadband front, Comcast lost 226,000 domestic internet subscribers in the quarter, besting consensus forecasts of -257,000. Overall revenue at the Philadelphia-based media giant increased 2% to $30.3 billion, ahead of forecasts for $29.8 billion, while adjusted earnings per share improved 3% to $1.25, topping projections for $1.16.

Profit grew 1% to $10.3 billion.