Comcast

The drama between Walt Disney and Comcast. Their rivalry adds intrigue to the desire of Disney boss Bob Chapek to acquire the rest of streaming service Hulu from the cable operator sooner rather than later. Comcast Chief Executive Brian Roberts is in position to let his counterpart squirm, but there’s a neat solution to help settle the score: ESPN.

Warner Bros. Discovery has been going all-in on cutting costs to alleviate its roughly $53 billion debt. But with uncertain financial prospects, the company might find itself in another merger —with Comcast. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts could be interested in combining WBD with NBCUniversal, giving the cable giant access to a well-known streaming service in the form of HBO Max.

The cable operator says it will grow its network sustainability by cutting electricity per terabyte of data in half by 2030.

Less than two hours after Walt Disney Co., CEO Bob Chapek said he’d like to exercise his right to buy out Comcast’s 33% stake in SVOD pioneer Hulu sooner rather than later, Comcast chief Brian Roberts said he’d buy the streamer outright if it were available.

FreeWheel, Comcast’s advanced advertising unit, has tapped Soo Jin Oh for the newly created role of chief strategy officer. Joining FreeWheel from Gamut where she was president, Oh will be based in New York and report to FreeWheel General Manager Mark McKee.

NBCUniversal Chief Executive Officer Jeff Shell has asked his top deputies to find savings at its legacy cable and broadcast TV networks, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans haven’t been finalized.

The retail giant is exploring bundling a streaming service into its Walmart+ membership program.

Comcast and Charter, the two largest U.S. cable companies, have a broadband growth problem. As tens of millions of Americans canceled their cable TV subscriptions in the past decade, the cable industry focused on the more profitable business of selling broadband internet.
Now, the number of U.S. households paying Comcast and Charter for high-speed Internet is falling for the first time, with both companies reporting residential broadband declines in the second quarter.

Comcast beat Wall Street analysts’ estimates for the second quarter, delivering total revenue of $30 billion and earnings per share of $1.01. The targets were $29.75 billion and 92 cents, respectively. NBCUniversal revenue rose 19% to $9.4 billion, while adjusted EBIDTA increased almost 20% to $1.86 billion.

Cable giant Comcast has been weighing the acquisition of a TV maker to bolster its nascent smart TV platform efforts. One of the companies approached by Comcast has been Vizio, according to three sources with knowledge of these conversations. Separately, Comcast has also eyed TV maker TP Vision, according to one source with knowledge of those talks.

He will oversee Comcast Advertising, including AudienceXpress, Effectv and FreeWheel.

The Netflix Co-CEO does confirm that it’s talking to Roku, Google and Comcast about potential partnerships.

The Miami-Fort Lauderdale market has an awful lot of strong players, in both English and Spanish

Is Comcast poised to make a big move? The cable and media giant has missed out on some snazzy acquisitions in recent years, failing to outmaneuver Disney to buy the bulk of 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets and falling just short of nabbing WarnerMedia. Losing out on the latter stunned Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell, who were enmeshed in planning how WarnerMedia would be integrated into their operations until Discovery landed their prize.

With pay-TV losses likely to continue, wireless has rapidly emerged as the primary pairing with home broadband at Comcast. “You’re really seeing it become the lead bundle, having the connectivity bundle with broadband together with wireless,” Comcast CFO Mike Cavanagh said Tuesday at the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference.

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts recently proposed spinning off the company’s NBCUniversal media unit in order to merge it with videogame giant Electronic Arts.

As Comcast prepares to leverage its Flex system in a streaming platform joint venture with Charter, the cable giant is “extremely focused” on growing the base of U.S. operators who it licenses to, Comcast Cable CEO Dave Watson said Wednesday.

Charter Communications and Comcast Corp. said they named Marcien Jenckes president of their joint venture to build a new streaming platform. Jenckes, who has been president of Comcast Advertising since 2017, will focus on developing the business and monetization models for the new platform, which will be built on Comcast’s Flex and include Comcast XClass TV business and the Xumo streaming service.

“Media revenues increased 36% to $6.9 billion, including Peacock revenue, which grew more than five times year-over-year to $472 million in the quarter,” said Comcast Corp. CFO Mike Cavanagh.

Comcast reported a revenue of $31 billion and an earnings per share of 78 cents, seeing its earnings jump as a result of increased viewership of the Olympics and the 2022 Super Bowl, but it also logged an operation loss stemming from NBCUniversal streaming service Peacock to tune of $456 million, as per the media conglomerate’s first-quarter earnings report Thursday.

Charter Communications and Comcast on Wednesday announced a 50/50 joint venture to develop a streaming platform on branded 4K streaming devices and smart TVs. Comcast will license Flex, the company’s aggregated streaming platform and hardware to the new joint venture, contribute the retail business for XClass TVs as well as Xumo, a streaming service acquired in 2020. Charter will make an initial contribution of $900 million, funded over multiple years.

Jeff Shell, CEO of Comcast-owned NBCUniversal, saw his total compensation climb to $21.6 million last year, up 30% over the year prior — the biggest pay bump among Comcast’s top execs in 2021. Comcast Chairman-CEO Brian Roberts’ pay package rose 3.7% in 2021, to $34 million. The disclosures came in the cable and entertainment giant’s proxy statement filing with the SEC Friday.

“Nothing” is faster than fiber. Literally. Comcast said it’s proving the point with new “hollowcore fiber” technology that it said transmits data 150% faster than traditional fiber with a 33% improvement in latency. Hollowcore fiber is, well, hollow at the center and takes advantage of the fact that light travels 50% faster through air than glass.

Effectv, the local advertising sales division of Comcast Cable, has struck a deal with Comscore, for its local TV measurement product, to be a “new form of currency” for Comcast’s local cable TV advertising deals. With the deal, Effectv will use Comscore’s audience impression-based measurement product for local advertising clients.

The FCC is finally moving on a request Comcast filed nearly nine months ago, asking the agency to declare that Nexstar is in violation of the 39% cap on broadcast national audience reach. But regulatory wheels move slowly, so there’s no indication yet of what the commission might do.

Comcast’s advertising division said it has licensed viewing data from the set-top-boxes in subscribers’ home to VideoAmp, one of the measurement companies looking to provide an alternative to Nielsen in the race to provide a cross-platform currency for buying and selling TV advertising. Adding data from Comcast’s footprint should make VideoAmp’s product more stable and reliable, the companies said.

Broadcasters are wending through a C-band repack now operating on an accelerated timeline with completion slated for Dec. 2023. The process is humming along much more smoothly than the RF repack that preceded it. Above, Sinclair Broadcast Group HEVC uplink gear.

Former president Donald Trump, who has been using his ongoing national circuit of campaign-style rallies to urge the boycott of DirecTV and parent company AT&T for removing conservative channel One America News (OAN), has expanded his wrath to Comcast. Speaking Saturday at the fairgrounds in the East Texas flatland town of Conroe, Trump described both publicly traded telecommunications giants as “left-wing lunatics who are destroying our nation.”

Under the continued agreement, AMC Networks’ linear channels — AMC, We TV, BBC America, IFC, and SundanceTV — and streaming service AMC Plus will remain available to Comcast Cable’s Xfinity TV, broadband and XClass customers. Additionally, the pact covers expanded availability of AMC Networks’ other targeted streaming services — Acorn TV, Shudder, Sundance Now, Allblk and the recently acquired Hidive — to Comcast users.

The number of monthly users of the streaming service — 24.5 million active accounts at the end of 2021 — is already at 75% of the company’s original projection for 2024, including 9 million who are paying for either limited commercials or no commercials. Thus, spending is being ramped up for even faster growth, with profits from the rest of NBCUniversal easily covering a few more years of losses at Peacock.

Comcast Corp. said this morning that it added fewer broadband customers than in recent quarters, a slowdown that comes after a period of record growth during the height of the coronavirus lockdowns. It reported a 9.6% decline in fourth-quarter net profit to $3.06 billion, or 66 cents a share, from $3.38 billion, or 73 cents a share, a year earlier. The company’s NBCUniversal unit, which is made up of its television, film and theme park businesses, saw revenue rise 25.6% to about $9.34 billion. Peacock hit 24.5 million active accounts, up from 20 million in June.

It includes distribution of ViacomCBS’s TV networks, including CBS Television Network, BET, CBS Sports Network, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount Network, Pop TV, Smithsonian Channel, Showtime and others.

It’s another case of the streaming wars making strange bedfellows: Comcast announced that starting today, Google’s YouTube TV is now available on Xfinity Flex, the cable giant’s video platform for broadband-only customers.