Peacock Posts $261 Million Profit as NBCU Spinoff Gains Momentum

By James Calloway

Peacock just posted its second consecutive profitable quarter — $261 million in pre-tax revenue — a swing of $478 million from the $217 million loss it recorded in Q3 last year.

The turnaround sits at the center of Comcast's third-quarter results, released Thursday, and it lands less than a year before NBCUniversal and Sky spin off from Comcast as a standalone company.

Comcast's media division — most of which will go with NBCU and Sky in the split — grew revenue 13%, from $4.7 billion in Q3 last year to $5.4 billion. The division includes NBC, Telemundo, Bravo, Universal's film and television studios, and Peacock.

What's driving the numbers?

Three things moved the quarter:

• Peacock's subscriber growth. Paid subscribers rose 17% year over year to 48 million, lifting domestic distribution revenue 22.4% to $2.1 billion.
• The FIFA World Cup. Telemundo delivered the highest-rated Spanish-language World Cup coverage in US history, helping domestic advertising revenue climb 14.6% to $1.8 billion. Strip out $224 million in incremental World Cup revenue, though, and ad growth would have been flat at $1.6 billion.
• The spinoff math. Comcast's total Q3 revenue of $29.3 billion beat Wall Street estimates slightly despite soft broadband and theme park results, but it marks a 6.1% decline from Q3 2025. Exclude costs from recent spinoffs and restructuring — Comcast sold Sky Germany and spun most of NBCU's cable networks, excluding Bravo, into Versant Media — and revenue was up 0.5% year over year.

The takeaway: the core media business is holding steady, and one streaming service is doing most of the accelerating.

Who's running the spinoff?

Comcast co-CEO Mike Cavanagh will run the NBCU side after the split, which remains on track for mid-next year. He said the company is well into building out the standalone public company's infrastructure.

Christopher Halpin joined as NBCUniversal's CFO in September, after his appointment was announced in July. He was most recently CFO, COO and EVP at People Inc., moving from digital publishing into TV and CTV.

The leadership team will inherit a Peacock that finally pays its own way.

What about the lumpy quarters?

Comcast isn't obsessing over Peacock's quarter-by-quarter profitability, and Cavanagh explained why: "You get lumpy depending on when rights kick in for different properties." The World Cup bump is the obvious example.

Still, he called the service's summer price increase a success, six years after Peacock launched. The company's next priority is bundling Peacock with YouTube Premium and other content providers.

On the ad market, Cavanagh said fluctuations from seasonal events like the World Cup or Olympics aside, conditions look relatively stable, with tech growth offsetting weakness in some consumer-driven categories.

Rather than leaning on once-every-four-years events, Comcast wants a steady sports calendar to carry the momentum. Cavanagh said NBCU's and Peacock's portfolio of live sports and programming will keep bringing in advertisers.

"We have the ingredients we need to pursue a strategy of growth and investing in what NBCUniversal and Sky, together, are going to be once we complete the spin," he said.

For the standalone company, a profitable Peacock plus recurring live sports could be the difference between spinning off a turnaround story and spinning off a cost problem.