Comcast Earnings Spotlight the Media Industry’s Upheaval

Comcast continues to shift its emphasis from being a cable TV company to being a digital company. Comcast has: 19 million cable subscribers, a loss of 491,000 since December; 31 million broadband internet subscribers; a gain of 461,000; and 42 million sign-ups to the streaming platform Peacock, a jump of 9 million. Comcast sells something that has proved more durable than sports and entertainment: broadband, the piping that carries all streaming platforms. In the first quarter, sales increased 12 percent, to $5.6 billion. It’s likely to overtake cable television as the company’s biggest business. CEO Brian Roberts highlighted the company’s plans to offer increased speeds that could exceed multiple gigabits a second, several times faster than the current benchmark. “The robustness of our network in the U.S. speaks to how we’ve positioned ourselves to compete against other providers,” he said. Comcast tends to see itself as a technology company first and a media concern second. Even Peacock is seen as an extension of its broadband business. Peacock is the fastest-growing unit, but it loses the most money. The streamer, which became widely available in the summer of 2020, took in $91 million in revenue but saw a pretax loss of $277 million in the first quarter of 2021.