Comcast’s Media Segment Earned $1.9 Billion in Revenue from Paris 2024 Olympic Games

Comcast says that it collected a record $1.9 billion in revenue from the Paris 2024 Olympic Games on NBC and Peacock.

“Daily viewership averaged over 30 million across our platforms, an increase of 80% compared to the prior Summer Olympics in 2021, and Peacock streamed 23.5 billion minutes, up 40% from all prior Summer and Winter Olympics combined,” said Mike Cavanagh, the President of Comcast Corporation in his Quarter 3 financials call. “All of this leading to a record high $1.9 billion of incremental Olympics revenue in our Media segment this third quarter.”

The Olympic bump made up almost the entirety of the $2 billion year-over-year increase to $32.1 billion in 2024.

Of the $1.9 billion, $1.4 billion came from advertising revenue, with Peacock subscriptions contributing “over $300 million”. Peacock, like most streaming services, has struggled with profitability, but narrowed its loss from $565 million in Q3 of 2023 to just $436 million in Q3 of 2024.

Peacock’s ad-supported subscription increased to $7.99/month and its ad-free subscription increased to $13.99/month before the Olympic Games, with discounts for annual subscriptions. The organization reported an estimated 3 million net-new subscribers during the quarter due in part to the Olympic Games, but also to the start of the NFL and college football seasons, both of which will be featured on Peacock in record-high numbers this season.

Cavanagh did say that the Games were profitable, though he declined to get specific as to how profitable they were. He did mention that the coverage in the lead-up to the Games underperformed expectations.

Comcast paid $7.65 billion for the U.S. broadcast rights to the Olympic Games between 2021 and 2032. That is an average of about $1.275 billion per Games, though the Summer Games and Winter Games carry very different economics. Comcast reported $963 million in incremental revenue from the Tokyo Olympics in the media segment, making an “average” of about $1.4 billion across the winter/summer pairing.

That’s just-more than the rights fee, though that doesn’t account for profit in other areas or the extremely-high production costs of the Games. The expectation is that the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics will be an even bigger windfall as an economic force that the world of sports have never before seen.

The Paris television ratings were a recovery from disappointing results at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics for Comcast, where time zones and the COVID-19 pandemic worked against the American broadcaster. Still, NBCUniversal booked $1.76 billion in revenue at the Tokyo Games, which was the previous record. Comcast paid $1.42 billion for the rights to those Tokyo Games.

The other big news from the call included weighing a spin-off of its declining cable networks, including CNBC, MSNBC, and USA Network. These networks carried a significant portion of the programming for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games and are also carry Olympic programming, including swimming, throughout the year after NBCUniversal shut down the Olympic Channel in September 2022.