Winter Olympics, Super Bowl Power NBCU Gains

First-quarter revenues at NBCUniversal rose 46.6 percent to $10.3 billion, driven by ad gains from the company’s coverage of the 2022 Beijing Olympics and the NFL Super Bowl.

Media revenues at NBCUniversal were up 36.3 percent to $6.9 billion, with advertising revenue up 59.2 percent and distribution revenue rising 21.6 percent. Revenues from the company’s studios division rose 15.1 percent to $2.8 billion, including content licensing revenues that were up 9.8 percent. Theme parks revenue rose to to $1.6 billion.

At sister company Sky, revenues were down 4.5 percent to $4.8 billion but flat on a constant currency basis. Content revenue decreased 14.3 percent to $295 million due to a change in sports programming licensing agreements in Italy and Germany. Advertising revenue increased 7.9 percent to $596 million, with gains in the U.K. partially offset by lower revenue in Italy. Direct-to-consumer revenues were stable at $3.9 billion. Total customer relationships at the platform slipped to 22.9 million, largely as a result of losses in Italy.

Comcast Cable reported Q1 revenues of $16.5 billion, a 4.7 percent improvement, with broadband, wireless, business services and ad revenues all rising in the period, while video and voice revenues fell. Despite shedding 512,000 video customers, total customer relationships increased by 194,000 to 34.4 million.

Overall revenues at Comcast Corporation were up 14 percent to $31 billion, delivering a net profit of $3.5 billion, a 6.6 percent increase.

“2022 is off to a great start,” said Chairman and CEO Brian L. Roberts. “For the first quarter, we reported healthy growth in adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EPS, generated significant free cash flow and increased our return of capital to shareholders. We also continued to make important organic investments and strategic decisions, highlighted by yesterday’s announcement of our new joint venture with Charter. This partnership demonstrates the benefits of our focus on innovation and enables us to bring entertainment aggregation and streaming products that run off our global technology platform to millions more customers. In cable, we are increasing the capacity of our broadband network and providing our customers with cutting-edge equipment that delivers the best in-home experience. Our media business is performing well, and the scale of our reach is underscored by our successful broadcast of the Super Bowl and the Olympics in the same week. These events were viewed by more than 200 million people in the U.S. across NBCUniversal’s platforms, including Peacock, which had an exceptional quarter. Our recovery from the pandemic at theme parks has been fantastic and shows no signs of slowing down. And, at Sky, we are pleased with our consistently strong results in the U.K. and continued improvement in Germany and Italy.”