Peacock churn rate raises questions about sports-focused strategy

Peacock has gone all-in on live sports to float its business, and so far the returns are not promising.

Just as the NBC-owned streamer posted losses of $432 million during the first quarter of 2026 in last week’s earnings filing — despite hosting marquee sporting events including Super Bowl LX, the Olympics, and the NBA All-Star Game — new churn-rate data from media analytics firm Antenna is painting a concerning picture for Peacock.

Per Antenna, Peacock’s churn rate, industry parlance for what percentage of subscribers cancel their subscription in a given month, has hovered around 9% through the first quarter of 2026. Comparatively, every other major streaming service, including Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Paramount+, and HBO Max, posted churn rates of 6% or less by March 2026.

Peacock has started to draw in lots of viewers with live sports (football, basketball, Olympics), but it struggles to keep them.

Peacock suffers the worst churn of any service. pic.twitter.com/R3vAfqOAxW

— Lucas Shaw (@Lucas_Shaw) April 27, 2026

It’s a discouraging sign for the streamer, which has recently entered into numerous pricey media rights deals with the hopes of attracting, and maintaining, sports fans throughout the calendar year.

Within the last six months, NBC and Peacock have begun new broadcast deals with both the NBA and MLB, with a large portion of those games being designated exclusively for Peacock (and now its sister cable channel NBCSN). The hope is that those deals, which NBC pays about $2.65 billion per year for, in conjunction with its NFL and college football programming in the fall and winter, will keep sports fans subscribed to Peacock year-round.

So far, that hasn’t been the case.

One could reasonably point to the quality of Peacock’s sports inventory as being one problem contributing towards its high churn rate. Regular-season NBA and MLB games are nice for consumers to have, but not the type of programming that will necessarily keep them subscribed in between tentpole events like, say, the Olympics and NBA playoffs.

Streaming consumers are thrifty, picking and choosing precisely when to turn subscriptions on and off to ensure they get the content they want, without paying for content they don’t need. Someone who subscribed to Peacock in February for the Olympics could’ve easily unsubscribed after a month, before returning in late April for the NBA playoffs. Then again, after early-round NBA games are done and Peacock is no longer needed, that subscriber could cancel once more, waiting until football season to return.

Realistically, a sports fan could subscribe to Peacock for just two months between February and September and catch the vast majority of its “important” exclusive programming, so long as that fan is okay missing out on some regular-season basketball and baseball, and can also access NBC without a Peacock subscription.

This is precisely the problem with the sports-focused strategy Peacock has taken. On paper, the streamer has a calendar chock-full of events that would entice any sports fan. In reality, most sports fans watch some events but not others, and can choose to sacrifice low-wattage regular-season games, especially when there are many other places to catch regular-season action that don’t require an additional subscription.

Combine this with an entertainment portfolio that doesn’t live up to what other streamers are offering, and Peacock is fighting an uphill battle for subscriber retention.

To be sure, the streamer is still in the early days of its sports-focused strategy, and company executives are still optimistic that a turnaround is coming. But programming costs for live sports are very high, and Peacock still doesn’t own enough “need-to-have” games on an exclusive basis to compel year-round loyalty from subscribers. It is the ultimate light-switch platform for savvy consumers, who are happy to flip on for a month or two here and there, but flip right back off when the time comes.