All the big entertainment companies are singing the same tune these days, and the tune is, "Help! We're in an unmanageable amount of debt!" With that in mind, it's starting to get easy to predict what the big guys' quarterly earnings calls will sound like. Streaming is picking up, but the other parts of the business are doing badly, so big decisions have to be made about the company's future. That's pretty much how it went for the Q3 call on Thursday at Comcast, which is now also considering breaking up to survive.
Revenue was up but profit was down overall at Comcast (via Variety), and the Olympics provided a major boost for Peacock. Paid subscribers reportedly increased 29% with revenue up 82% for the streaming service. According to IndieWire, Peacock added 3 million subscribers during the Olympics specifically, but nevertheless lost $436 million dollars. On the traditional television side, the company lost 87,000 broadband customers. All told, "the company topped media analysts’ expectations," IndieWire reports.
Even with some good news in that completely mixed bag of numbers, Comcast has to consider how to survive in a rapidly changing industry, just like everyone else. The company's president Mike Cavanagh shared that the company will consider breaking off its cable networks—which includes Oxygen True Crime, Bravo, MSNBC, CNBC, USA Network, E!, Syfy, Universal Kids, and Universo—into a new publicly traded company. "As you know, we chose not to participate in the M&A process around Paramount in the earlier part of this year, but we would consider partnerships in streaming despite their complexities, and like many of our peers in media, we are experiencing the effects of the transition in our video businesses, and have been studying the best path forward for these assets," Cavanagh said (via Variety). "To that end, we are now exploring whether creating a new well-capitalized company owned by our shareholders and comprised of our strong portfolio of cable networks would position them to take advantage of opportunities in the changing media landscape and create value for our shareholders. We are not ready to talk about any specifics yet, but we’ll be back to you as and when we reach firm conclusions."
Cavanagh went on to say that the new company would just be cable networks and not NBC's broadcast operations, but it is otherwise too early in the process for him to comment on specifics. However, the announcement echoes a similar one made by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav earlier this year. This seems like a good indicator of the direction the business is going altogether. Amid the cord-cutting era and these conglomerates' all-in bet on streaming, will the cable networks survive being offloaded and forced to fend for themselves? Time will tell, but one way or another the TV business will transform again.
