Media giants have a message for Wall Street after a tough 2022: Expect better days ahead.

Two big names, Comcast (CMCSA) and Disney (DIS), have said that losses in the streaming business are at a peak or reaching one this year. And Paramount Global (PARA) says investment in its streaming service Paramount+ is at a high — meaning that investors can expect it will spend less in the future.

All of that could bode well for profitability, which is increasingly a focus for investors. The stock market wiped a whopping $500 billion-plus in market capitalization from the world's biggest media, cable, and entertainment giants in 2022. Meantime, interest rates have gone up, making borrowing more expensive.

“As we now painfully know, money is no longer cheap," MoffettNathanson analyst Robert Fishman said in a recent note. "Wall Street’s attitude towards streaming has now largely reversed course as more skeptics raise the question of whether streaming is a good business (a question we have long been asking). In turn, companies are no longer willing to spend whatever it takes, in part because attitudes and strategies have shifted and rationalized, but also because their balance sheets no longer have what it takes.”

'Peak losses' in sight?

Comcast's fledgling streaming service Peacock saw its operating loss increase 47% to $2.5 billion in 2022 from the prior year, the company revealed in its latest earnings report.

Comcast president Michael Cavanagh told investors on the earnings call in January, "We believe 2023 will be peak losses for Peacock and from there, steadily improve." He estimated losses will total about $3 billion this year.

"We spend quite a bit of money creating content so migrating some of that content as eyeballs move to a more streaming universe — we like what we're doing," Cavanagh said. "We think Peacock is absolutely the right strategy for our company."

Meanwhile, Disney's direct-to-consumer division shed a whopping $4 billion-plus in its fiscal 2022 ended on Oct. 1, after it spent an estimated $33 billion on content last year. On the company's earnings call in November, Disney's CFO Christine McCarthy said that "peak losses are now behind us."