Sky Europe suffers record churn
July 29, 2022
By Chris Forrester
Comcast released its Q2 financials on July 28th and showed (for Q2) an improvement of 5.1 per cent in revenue (y-o-y), and for the half-year of 9.5 per cent (y-o-y). Sky’s ‘Adjusted EBITDA’ increased 54.1 per cent to $863 million, but in the numbers were Comcast’s ‘Total Customer Relationships’ and this is where Sky’s churn statistics were revealed.
Comcast stated: “Revenue for Sky decreased 13.8 per cent to $4.5 billion in Q2/2022. Excluding the impact of currency, revenue decreased 3.5 per cent compared to the prior year period, primarily reflecting lower direct-to-consumer revenue, content revenue, and advertising revenue. Direct-to-consumer revenue decreased 2.4 per cent to $3.7 billion due to a decrease in customer relationships and average revenue per customer relationship in Italy and Germany compared to the prior year period, including the impact of resets in our sports rights, partially offset by an increase in customer relationships and average revenue per customer relationship in the U.K. compared to the prior year period”.
Total Customer Relationships decreased by 255,000 to 22.7 million in Q2. For the six months ended June 30, 2022, total customer relationships decreased by 361,000.
In the half-year to June 30th, 2021 Sky Europe lost just 26,000 subscribers. During Q2/2022, that had mushroomed to 361,000 cancelled subs. Sky’s European customer base has fallen from 23.198 million at the end of Q2/2021 to 22.666 million at the end of Q2/2022.
As to Comcast’s overall picture, it returned $4.2 billion to shareholders through a $1.2 billion dividend and $3 billion on its share buy-back programme.
Comcast said its Peacock subscriber base was “flat” at 13 million.