For Peacock, the magic number is 42,000,000. It’s also proven to be an elusive number.
For the entirety of 2025, Peacock has been stuck at 41 million subscribers. Though there has been ebbs and flows — per subscription-measurement firm Antenna, Peacock’s monthly churn rate has fluctuated between five to eight percent throughout the year — at the end of each quarter, its paid subs have come out to 41 million.
The Comcast/NBCUniversal spin says that is a sign of consistency, not stalled growth. It’s kinda-sorta true.
This is an odd-numbered year, which means NBCU and Peacock have no Olympics to lean on. That doesn’t mean there’s no strong programming, but this side of Love Island, the stuff that drives paid Peacock subscriptions is very sports-centric — and very backloaded in the calendar year. That’s especially true for 2025.
The NFL and college football return to the schedule with just a few weeks left in the third quarter of any given year. Peacock’s real 2025 call to action, the return of the NBA on NBC — and now Peacock, which carries exclusive games — did not happen until three weeks after the Q3 2025 cutoff (Sept. 30). We do not yet know how many subscribers Peacock added in October, and we won’t for a while.
It should be a good fall for Peacock, but summer brought with it a few challenges that carry forward. In early summer, the streamer jacked up its prices by a significant margin, $3 per month. It was a confident move by a company that knew its popular Love Island USA reunion episode was on the way, and football and basketball would follow. The price increase coincided with a churn increase: Antenna reports Peacock’s churn rate in May and June was six percent, which increased to seven percent in July and again to eight percent in August and September.
Weeks after the price hike, Peacock, for years the home to WWE Network lost pro wrestling’s most valuable programming, WWE PLEs (premium live events). Among WWE fans, Peacock, with all those WWE pay-per-views (without having to pay per view) was the best deal in streaming. One price hike and like eight fewer PLEs later — including the main ones like Royal Rumble, WrestleMania and SummerSlam — and that was no longer the case.
A real sport, the NBA, is the hot visible Peacock addition of 2025, the streamer’s real top deal point this year may be one not scored by John Tesh’s “Roundball Rock.” Before late August of this year, Peacock subscribers could only sign up for the service directly, through NBCU’s parent company Comcast, or through Comcast’s cable rival Charter. At a time when streamers bundling became all the rage, Peacock held as long as it could.
That ended in a big way about two months ago. At the end of August, ad-free Peacock offered itself up to Amazon Channels. Days later, Peacock became available as an alternative to Paramount+ for Walmart+ subscribers. In October, a Peacock/Apple TV bundle was revealed (ahead of the NBA tipoff), and, after a lengthy public spat, Peacock is coming to YouTube TV.
It’s not that no one wanted to partner with Peacock before, so much as NBCU wanted to keep every subscriber dollar for itself. Bundles mean split subscriber revenue, and Peacock execs weren’t having that. A person with knowledge of the Walmart deal told The Hollywood Reporter that NBCU was approached two or three years ago to bundle Peacock with Walmart+, but the financials did not work for the young streamer. With 41 million subscribers (mostly) paying full freight directly — and with some big “Pay to: NBA” checks in its outgoing mailbox — Peacock changed its ocelli (the name for a peacock’s eye-looking feather spots).
The debits and credits still aren’t adding up. Peacock has yet to turn a profit, and executives have yet to (publicly) set a timeline to break even. Though Peacock continues to lose hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter, this summer, it narrowed its losses to $217 million. That’s historically good for a Peacock summer.
More help is on the way — at a jog. A white-hat on horseback named Taylor Sheridan (the cowboy’s name, not the horse) is riding into town. Next spring, Sheridan, the man behind Yellowstone (and its 50 spinoffs), Tulsa King, Landman and Lioness will move his film deal from Paramount to Universal. And beginning in 2029, Sheridan will do the same for TV. Forty-two million, here we come! Albeit at a slow gait.
