Comcast Should Be All-In Or All-Out On Hulu
After Comcast recently hinted that it may not sell its remaining stake in Hulu to Disney in 2024, it seemed likely that a joint partnership on the streaming service was the best idea for all involved. While housing some Comcast-owned content on Hulu meant it wouldn’t be streaming on Peacock exclusively (or at all), it also meant driving up the value of Hulu — something ultimately beneficial for both Comcast and Disney alike.
So while that makes sense, it also seems like Comcast is caught between a rock and a hard place as it tries to drive more subscribers to Peacock. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the conglomerate was considering removing Comcast shows currently on Hulu like The Voice, Chicago P.D., Saturday Night Live and more, and have a small window to do so before early next year, or else those shows stay exclusively on Hulu ‘til 2024 (the original time when Disney was supposed to buy the remaining stake in the service). Additionally, they’ll consider longer windows (like two weeks longer) for Comcast content that winds up on Hulu, too.
At this point, Comcast would be best served to either be all the way in or all the way out on Hulu.
While the middle ground worked for a time, it seems Peacock just needs exclusivity and Comcast’s checkbook too much to share NBC-related shows or resources with anyone else. Keeping plenty of its inventory on Hulu means avoiding maximizing the growth potential of Peacock at a critical time when it gets to host two Olympics and a Super Bowl in the span of less than a year. Pulling a lot of its most attractive content away from Hulu means it’s actively stunting the value of that service, though — one it either wants to profit more off the sale of, or hold and continue to benefit from with its current 33% stake.
We’ve already discussed in this space how the middle ground hurts Hulu through 2024, and how a long-term commitment from Comcast actually benefits all parties since it encourages Disney’s deep pockets to spend on more content for the service. That doesn’t require Comcast to abandon Peacock at all. But it can find a way to benefit from ownership of both services with shared content rights, various windowed deals, and pushing addressable ad inventory. Doing so requires a more active role than what they’re doing at current, but not so much that Peacock suffers any losses. It just doesn’t get the biggest squeeze out of a key time in its growth curve.
And that’s really where the hesitation comes for Comcast. Because while the service has The Office, exclusive shows and major events like the Olympics, football, soccer and more, it still lacks the sort of growth that competitive services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ have experienced over the last two years. Ultimately, they may be competing more directly with Hulu and Paramount+, yes. But even those services are more fully developed at this point after years of work at it (Paramount+ obviously taking cues from predecessors like CBS All-Access and Showtime). Peacock is lagging over a year in, and consumers only have so much time left for TV, as various reports are revealing.
Would SNL reruns and divesting its stake in Hulu in a few years really be enough to make up for that lost time? Perhaps not, though at least Comcast would avoid using its content to bolster a competitive service, as it basically has been for the last year. While it’s advantageous for the company to have its hands in two separate ad-supported streaming services in the long-term, putting all of its resources toward the one it has full ownership of may wind up being the more crucial play for its future.
If Peacock is truly Comcast’s long-term play and the eventual replacement for its linear networks, then it has to put the success of that service first, second, third and fourth on its list of priorities. Despite the limit on how low the price of Comcast’s Hulu stake can go upon sale, they might as well rip off the bandaid as quickly as possible and just invest those billions in full toward making Peacock a full-fledged streaming heavyweight, with as much of its content as possible ont hat service — before it loses a chance to do so successfully.
