Brian Roberts, chairman and CEO of Comcast, in January.<\/p>\n
(TNS) \u2014\u00a0Comcast, the\u00a0Philadelphia-born media giant with roots in cable television, for years has been losing more cable customers than it\u2019s been adding. And more recently, with leaders citing \u201ca highly competitive environment,\u201d it\u2019s also lost broadband internet customers.<\/p>\n
So this year, the company set in motion multiple new strategies to court consumers.<\/p>\n
In the broadband and mobile businesses, that meant offering a national pricing structure, five-year price guarantees, a free mobile line for a year, and unlimited data packages for mobile customers.<\/p>\n
The company also honed in on customer service, making it possible to buy products in fewer steps, and using Google AI to manage customer interactions, Comcast president\u00a0Mike Cavanagh\u00a0said\u00a0in a quarterly earnings call late last month. He boasted \u201cmore than a 20% improvement in purchase conversion rates.\u201d<\/p>\n
Comcast isn\u2019t facing a unique challenge. Cable on the whole is \u201cin terminal decline\u201d across operators, said consumer technology industry analyst\u00a0Avi Greengart, but broadband \u201cwas propping them up.\u201d Now, he said, \u201cthat is also starting to decline due to higher competition, particularly from fixed wireless.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cComcast is trying to find a route that protects themselves from that,\u201d Greengart said.<\/p>\n
Despite the customer losses in the most recent quarter, leaders at Comcast, which has 14,000 employees in the\u00a0Philadelphia\u00a0region and 8,500 at its\u00a0Center City\u00a0headquarters, were upbeat about the future of their internet business.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur goal for all the actions we\u2019ve taken is to build a loyal customer base that churns less and values our services more,\u201d Cavanagh said. \u201cCustomers are responding to the simplicity and power of these changes, with roughly half of our eligible new customer connects choosing our five-year price guarantee this quarter.\u201d<\/p>\n
Comcast is also unlike the others in cable and internet, thanks to additional business segments like theme parks and movie studios. Those aren\u2019t easy businesses, Greengart said, but they\u2019re \u201chit-driven\u201d and currently benefiting from a new movie and\u00a0Orlando\u00a0theme park.<\/p>\n
And more changes taking place in rapid succession.<\/p>\n
Within one week in July, Comcast made several significant announcements: a\u00a0partnership with T-Mobile\u00a0to bring wireless services to more business customers; the\u00a0board members for its upcoming spinoff\u00a0of several media brands including\u00a0USA Network, CNBC,\u00a0MSNBC, and E!; and the\u00a0launch of\u00a0Stream Store, where its cable and internet customers can buy cheap streaming service bundles.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are a lot of moving pieces at Comcast at the moment\u201a\u201d wrote\u00a0Craig Moffett, a telecom-industry analyst who has watched Comcast for years, in his take on the company\u2019s quarterly earnings report. \u201cBut most of those pieces are moving in the right direction.\u201d<\/p>\n
These moves line up with a growth strategy that pulls away from cable, with internet as the linchpin.<\/p>\n
Which Comcast services are growing?<\/p>\n
Comcast reported 201,000 fewer residential broadband customers in its most recent quarter, making for 594,000 fewer over the course of one year.<\/p>\n
Still, those numbers are a small percentage of the whole. More than 31.5 million\u00a0U.S.\u00a0homes and businesses get their broadband internet from Comcast and it remains the\u00a0largest home internet provider\u00a0in the country.<\/p>\n
The company has been\u00a0betting on growth in that demand, pointing to entertainment as the reason for a majority of internet use.<\/p>\n
The mobile phone business gained customers \u2014 378,000 more in the second quarter, driven in part by that free line offer. That customer base is still smaller than internet and even cable, with about 8.5 million total wireless lines.<\/p>\n
With the recently announced T-Mobile deal, which targets business users, the number of wireless users seems poised to grow more when that takes effect next year. (Comcast\u2019s residential wireless services use Verizon\u2019s network.)<\/p>\n
Wireless is a competitive space, too, Greengart acknowledged, \u201cbut this is an area that really fits with the cable operators\u2019 existing business models.\u201d Comcast doesn\u2019t have to operate the wireless networks but already has access to a large customer base, he said. And when customers\u2019 devices are set to switch data use from mobile networks to WiFi when available, the cost to Comcast becomes lower.<\/p>\n
Cable, meanwhile, continues to drop off.<\/p>\n
That customer base shrunk by 751,000 in the first half of 2025, dipping below 12 million. In a filing with the\u00a0U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said those declines are expected to continue.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a time when Comcast\u2019s media business was considered a drag on their consolidated results\u201d Moffett wrote. \u201cWell \u2026 today, media might still be viewed as a challenged business, but it is almost certainly viewed as being preferable to cable. Anything is viewed as preferable to cable.\u201d<\/p>\n
A future without cable is conceivable, Greengart said, if it becomes too costly for providers to justify.<\/p>\n
Despite the decline, Comcast still brings cable into about 11.7 million homes.<\/p>\n
Selling pro-basketball and family vacations<\/p>\n
When talking about Comcast\u2019s \u201ccore six growth drivers\u201d in the quarterly earnings call, CFO\u00a0Jason Armstrong\u00a0did not mention cable.<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s not to say Comcast is stepping back from the business of bringing moving pictures to TV screens.<\/p>\n
In addition to broadband, wireless, and business services, Armstrong listed three other \u201cgrowth\u201d areas: parks, streaming, and studios. Those three still bring in much less revenue than the cable and internet businesses. But they\u2019ve made splashy moves.<\/p>\n
The Peacock streaming service isn\u2019t yet profitable, but it\u2019s getting closer and will be\u00a0adding NBA games\u00a0to its menu in the fall. And with\u00a0its newest theme park, Epic Universe in\u00a0Orlando, the company is building out what Cavanagh called \u201ca true weeklong destination\u201d\u00a0to compete with the nearby\u00a0Disney\u00a0resort.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot many companies on the planet could take the decade it took to build maybe the finest theme park in the world,\u201d CEO\u00a0Brian Roberts\u00a0said on the recent earnings call.<\/p>\n
Those six \u201cgrowth\u201d businesses now bring in nearly 60% of Comcast\u2019s revenue, Roberts noted. That will increase to about 65% after the company\u00a0spins off its cable network entities into a separate company, Versant.<\/p>\n
If trends continue, Roberts predicted, those six segments will eventually make up 70% of Comcast\u2019s revenue within a few years.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re pivoting; our products are exciting,\u201d Roberts said. \u201cAnd the way we tell that story to the consumer with some of the team that we\u2019re assembling, I think you\u2019re going to see that really resonate.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Brian Roberts, chairman and CEO of Comcast, in January. (TNS) \u2014\u00a0Comcast, the\u00a0Philadelphia-born media giant with roots in cable…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76547,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[174,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-76546","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-internet","8":"tag-internet","9":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76546\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}