Peacock has reached 54 million signups to-date and 20 million monthly active accounts, NBCUniversal’s parent company Comcast revealed Thursday during its second-quarter 2021 earnings call.
The overall signup tally is up from the 42 million subscribers that the company reported its fledgling streaming service had reached by the end of March. That’s well ahead of targets, as Comcast had previously projected Peacock would have up to 35 million subscribers by the end of 2024.
It should be noted that Peacock was finally made available on Amazon Fire TV devices, a huge player in the streaming world, during Q2.
Peacock Reaches 42 Million Signups
Also on the call Thursday, CEO Brian L. Roberts revealed Peacock will be launching internationally for the first time later this year as it becomes available to European customers via UK-based media provider Sky, which is owned by Comcast.
“Later this year, we will leverage Sky’s significant scale and powerful brand to include Peacock at no additional cost for its 20 million customers across Europe,” Roberts said.
While we have an update on Peacock signups overall, we don’t know how many people are actually paying for one of the streaming platform’s two premium tiers, since NBCU did not break those out. The Wall Street Journal reported in May that the service has only 10 million paying subscribers. (An even more recent Bloomberg report earlier this month said Peacock has about 14 million monthly users, with about 3 million of those paying for the service).
Peacock’s ad-supported service first became available to Comcast and Cox customers on April 15, 2020 — three months before its full launch on July 15.
Peacock, which offers originals like the limited series “Dr. Death” and “Saved by the Bell” reboot and library content like “The Office” (which began streaming on the service on Jan. 1, offering its first two seasons at no charge, with Seasons 3-9 behind a paywall) and “30 Rock,” is available in two tiers, one for free and one with two different levels of fees.
The free option, called Peacock Free, includes next-day access to current seasons of freshman broadcast series on NBC, as well as library content like “Parks & Recreation” and curated daily news and sports programming. As for Peacock originals, this option only includes “select” episodes as well as access to what Peacock is calling “streaming genre channels” like “SNL Vault,” “Family Movie Night” and “Olympic Profiles.”
The second tier, called Peacock Premium, is available for no extra charge to Comcast and Cox subscribers. For everyone else, it cost $4.99 a month for an ad-supported option, or $9.99 a month to have no ads. The Premium tier features everything on the Free option but includes all Peacock Originals, early access to late-night series like “Tonight Show” and “Late Night” and more sports including Premier League soccer and WWE Network.
Comcast reported the Peacock sign-ups update Thursday as it revealed its second-quarter 2021 earnings, which you can read more about here.