NBCUniversal will start selling Peacock Premium Plus through The Roku Channel premium-subscriptions hub at $16.99 a month or $169.99 a year, The Desk reported on April 21. On reporter Matthew Keys’ read, it is the first time Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA) has put its ad-free Peacock tier inside a competitor’s marketplace. The deal lands the same week as a Q1 print pre-selling a Q2 “meaningful inflection,” an eight-figure proxy disclosure for Co-CEO Mike Cavanagh, and Fox Corporation’s claw-back of the 2026 Big Ten Championship Game. Deadline corroborated the pricing and that the deal covers Premium Plus only.
The Roku Channel move is the next door NBCU has agreed to open in a 24-month sequence (StreamSaver in 2024, the Charter Premium+ upgrade path, an Apple TV/Peacock standalone bundle, Amazon Prime Video Channels, Walmart+, and now Roku) that takes Comcast from “we sell Peacock” to “almost any hub can” as the streaming-wars era ends and the next phase of monetization shifts to hub take-rates. Max joined the same Roku Channel hub in November 2024; Peacock is the second of the consolidated streamers to follow.
Peacock crossed $2.1 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time ($901 million advertising, $1.2 billion distribution, $189 million other) and reached 46 million paid subscribers, Comcast disclosed in its Q1 2026 earnings release. Group revenue was $31.46 billion, up 5.3% year-over-year. Peacock’s EBITDA loss widened to $432 million from $215 million a year earlier on $1.95 billion of programming and production costs, which CFO Jason Armstrong attributed to Super Bowl 60, the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, and the first year of the NBA contract. Q2 will be “a meaningful inflection point, with Peacock expected to approach profitability,” Armstrong told analysts, per the earnings call transcript.
Two adjacent disclosures cut against that pitch. Comcast’s 2026 DEF 14A put Cavanagh’s 2025 pay at $71.76 million, roughly 2.5x his 2024 package and including a $35 million stock grant tied to his January 2026 elevation to co-CEO, with Brian Roberts at $35.15 million, Variety reported from the proxy. The Cavanagh print is the second eight-figure 2025 package among the consolidated Big Four, after Warner Bros. Discovery’s shareholder rebuke of David Zaslav’s merger-related parachute the same week. And Fox will pay NBC $45 million to $55 million plus extra regular-season inventory to reclaim the 2026 Big Ten Championship Game, first reported by The Wall Street Journal’s Joe Flint; NBC had reportedly shopped the title game to Netflix and Amazon Prime Video at roughly $70 million before Fox blocked the sublicense.
Forward triggers for buyers are the May 11 NewFronts, where NBCU EVP of ad platforms Ryan McConville will reprise the agentic-AI ad initiative detailed at CES with RPA, Newton Research, and FreeWheel, and the late-July Q2 print, when Armstrong’s “approach profitability” framing resolves to either EBITDA breakeven or true operating profit.
