Success of ‘Love Island’ proves Comcast was right to keep Bravo
Success of ‘Love Island’ proves Comcast was right to keep Bravo
‘Love Island’ Season 7 has seen ratings climb to within reach of Netflix’s ‘Love is Blind,’ which portends well for Comcast’s decision to keep Bravo in the fold.
With summer in full swing, and scripted network and cable television shows — not to mention most live sports — on hiatus until the fall, reality TV is having its moment in the sun. The Peacock original series “Love Island” recently debuted its seventh season, and new data from Luminate shows that it’s a ratings smash. The data is impressive in its own right, but it also goes to demonstrate the wisdom of Peacock’s parent company Comcast in not including the Bravo cable channel in its plan to spin off its cable networks in a separate company.
Key Details:
- Battle with Netflix: Ratings for “Love Island” are approaching the level of the Netflix reality series “Love is Blind.”
- Radical shift: Comcast announced in November that it planned to spin off most of its cable channels into a new company.
- Keeping it real: The reality programming on Bravo could continue to bring needed revenue to Comcast for years to come.
“Love Island” moved to Peacock from CBS in 2022, taking it off broadcast and moving it to a streaming-exclusive title. That might lead one to think that viewership for the show has decreased, but that’s certainly not the case this season; according to Luminate, the recently-released Season 7 has drawn the two biggest weeks of viewership for “Love Island” since the show moved. It complied over 1.1 billion minutes streamed between June 6 and 12, and more than 1.6 billion minutes in the week of June 13 through 19.
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As Luminate’s data demonstrates, the success of “Love Island” Season 7 puts its ratings in range of another hugely popular streaming reality show: Netflix’s “Love is Blind.” The numbers show that last year’s Season 6 of “Love is Blind” peaked at almost 1.8 billion viewing minutes in its second week of availability, a number very close to the ratings achieved by “Love Island” Season 7 in its second week. Neither Season 7 or Season 8 of “Love is Blind” rose to the heights of Season 6 from a ratings perspective.
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The fact that “Love Island” is competing so well with “Love is Blind” is impressive enough in its own right. After all, “Love Island” is a Peacock-exclusive show now, and Netflix has something like seven times the amount of customers that Peacock announced in Comcast’s last quarterly earnings report.
But the data also goes to show the wisdom of Comcast in planning for its future. Last November, Comcast announced that it would be spinning off a number of assets into their own company. Peacock, the NBC broadcast channel, the Universal movie studio, and its theme parks would remain within the Comcast ecosystem, but most of its cable channels would be moved to the new entity, which has since been given the name Versant.
One of Comcast’s cable networks was not moved into Versant, however; Bravo. This channel is hyper-focused on unscripted reality shows like “Below Deck” and the “Real Housewives” franchise, and feeds many of its shows to Peacock for on-demand streaming.
That programming is likely a cornerstone of Peacock viewership. Without more concrete data from the streamer it’s hard to say for sure whether or not that’s the case, but the data from Luminate demonstrates that at least some reality TV is drawing a lot of attention to the streaming service, and Bravo has a reputation as an established source for these types of shows among audiences.
That being the case, having Bravo remain in the fold was a shrewd decision by Comcast’s higher-ups. The channel can continue to bring in advertising revenue and carriage fees in its own right, and it can also help Comcast further its goal of building Peacock into a unique product in the streaming marketplace, one that can continue to stand on its own among giants.
Even if Peacock eventually proves it cannot stand on its own two feet indefinitely, the amount of popular unscripted content on the service could be a powerful bargaining chip should Comcast ever decide that it would rather sell the streamer. Netflix or another huge streamer would likely have to pay significant sums to get their hands on such audience-friendly IP.
Either way, the decision to keep Bravo instead of spinning it off looks like a very wise one on Comcast’s part. Instead of grouping Bravo with other cable channels that may sell for pennies on the dollar in the not-too-distant future, Comcast is able to keep it as a prized asset that could make meaningful contributions to the company’s future.
Peacock
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