If you needed any more proof that “free” sells in the streaming space, Peacock, the only major contender streaming service that offers a free version already has 10+ million subscribers.
More than 10 million households have signed up for Peacock, the new streaming service from Comcast’s NBCUniversal. The media giant shared the update in its second-quarter earnings release, and management had much more to say about the early results during the accompanying conference call.
Comcast’s Peacock Is Off to a Strong Start
“Not only are more people signing up than we projected, but they are watching more frequently and engaging much longer than we projected,” Jeff Shell, CEO of NBCUniversal, told analysts.
HBO Max, by comparison, has had 4.5 million subscribers. That is roughly 15 million new subscribers without Roku and Amazon Fire stick users. This most certainly is not what Roku wants to hear. They need to hurry up already and get to the bargaining table. A couple months have passed (see: Why not put the deal terms with Roku and Amazon Fire out there for everybody to see, HBO Max and Peacock?)
Speaking of earnings calls, Roku is scheduled to deliver theirs Wednesday 8/5, and some analysts are predicting — gasp — no profits.
The average estimate right now is for revenue to come in 25% stronger in Q2 2020 than it did in Q2 2019. Despite this sales growth, however, analysts predict that Roku’s losses will only increase — more than quintuple, in fact, to a loss of $0.51 per diluted share.
Why Roku Stock Popped 5% This Morning
I probably shouldn’t get started on companies that don’t make profits being popular, but it concerns customers. This week Sprint is going the way of the dinosaur, as it was gobbled up by another company. Maybe that will be the future for Roku someday.
(this gets me thinking about who might want to buy them … hmm)
Did you sign up for Peacock and/or HBO Max? If you did, what motivated you to do so? Yellowstone (FIRST LOOK) has been on the Reelgood top trending picks (https://reelgood.com/curated/trending-picks) for several weeks.
Movies, Movies, Movies 
I’m a non-cord-cutter, so I get HBO Max for free with my cable subscription. I’ve used it sparingly so far, but will prob watch a couple shows before too long. I’ve not yet signed for Peacock, but honestly it’s more from lack of knowledge. I haven’t even looked into what they are offering yet. But I’m sure I will at some point!
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Peacock has a decent library of movies spanning the years. If you like the Hitchcock films (they’ve got just about all of them) or the Universal monster movies, like Abbott & Costello meet Frankenstein, and so on.
We are XFinity customers with the Flex box, so we’ve had Peacock since the customers-only launch. They’ve moved a considerable number of movies in and out, see our post for the official launch here: https://moviereviewsbyus.com/2020/07/15/peacock-has-sort-of-launched-for-everybody-july-15/
As for original content, they don’t have too much right now, but the post linked above covers that too.
I think a lot of people are there for some of the well known TV shows that used to be on Netflix, Yellowstone and/or the fact they have a free ad-supported tier.
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