Comcast Thriving on Continued Shift From Cable TV to Broadband Internet

The number of households who subscribe to satellite and cable TV continues to decline and broadcast TV ratings are going off a cliff, but Comcast more than compensated for those shifts in its year-end revenue and earnings numbers. Comcast, which is the country’s largest broadband provider and second-largest bundled-TV provider, announced strong year-end financials on Wednesday.

“If you look at smart homes, everything at CES was all about what’s going to happen to the home of the future,” Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said during a call with investment analysts. “If you look at our bit-per-home consumption rate, it’s up even more this year than the year before. That’s why we like the [broadband] business so much.”

Comcast added 1.2 million residential high-speed internet subscribers in 2017 — including 350,000 in the fourth quarter — and saw revenue and earnings growth across its broadband and entertainment divisions. Roberts described Comcast’s residential broadband, Xfinity X1 TV platform and new Xfinity Mobile phone service collectively as “connectivity” businesses across all of its customers’ connected devices, and he highlighted Xfinity Mobile several times during the earnings call.

“After launching the business from the ground up in May, we ended the year with more than 350,000 customer lines and real momentum,” Roberts said. “With Xfinity Mobile now fully rolled out in our retail stores and new features like our recent introduction of bring your own device, we’re excited about what’s coming in 2018.”

The U.S. media market’s shift over the last few years away from bundled TV and toward high-speed internet has been driven largely by the rise of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video. Comcast has put significant development into making its Xfinity X1 TV platform, which 60 percent of its TV subscribers have, a hub for broadcast, cable, premium cable and more recently streaming outlets like Netflix and YouTube.

In 2017, Comcast generated momentum across its cable networks by negotiating ad rates and carriage fees that outpaced the modest ratings declines across those networks weathered bigger declines at NBC — the No. 1 broadcast network the last four years — with Sunday Night FootballThis Is Us and The Voice.

The Super Bowl and Winter Olympics coming up over the next month will give NBC a big boost going into the second half of the 2017-2018 TV season, and NBC will be back with Sunday Night Football in the fall. “We’ll have something like two-thirds of all the big nights on broadcast television in the next 12 months,” NBCUniversal Steve Burke said during the earnings call.

Comcast did not address Disney potentially taking control of Hulu as part of its acquisition of 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets.

Scott Porch writes about the TV business for Decider, is a contributing writer for Playboy, and hosts a weekly podcast about new digital content called Consumed with Scott Porch. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.