Wouldn’t it be cool if the same company that sold you internet also sold you TV shows and movies?
This was an idea lots of people had over the past three decades. Now, almost no one thinks that’s a good idea. Just because someone pays you for broadband doesn’t mean they want to buy a streaming service from you. And vice versa.
Comcast is the latest company to reach that conclusion: It is splitting itself into two, and is spinning out its NBC Universal entertainment business, which includes assets like the Peacock streaming service, its powerful film and TV studio, and its growing theme parks unit.
The news comes just a few months after Comcast spun out its declining cable TV networks into a business now called Versant. And it comes 25 years after Comcast first acquired NBCUniversal from General Electric.
Back then, the idea was that Comcast already owned the pipes that brought TV and the internet into your home, so it made sense to own the content that would flow through those pipes, too.
Not everyone was sold on the pitch. At the time, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes noted that his company was doing the opposite, by splitting its content business from its business that sold cable TV and internet connections. Time Warner had already gone through a disastrous merger with AOL at the peak of the dot-com boom, and the logic of tying content and distribution had turned out to be “nonsensical,” Bewkes said.
Plenty of investors have questioned the move over the years, arguing that Comcast would be worth more if it weren’t running a media business at a time when the media business is in genuine flux.
But again: Pipes + content is something lots of people have tried to make work over the years. After Bewkes shrank Time Warner into a content-only company, he eventually sold it to AT&T, which told investors that combining a movie studio and HBO would make its wireless business stronger — and then changed its mind a few years later. Verizon tried a version of this, too, by combining AOL and Yahoo with its wireless business. It also bailed on the strategy after a couple of years.
If you want to, you can argue that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch are trying a digital version of this right now, by spending $22 billion to buy Roku. But that’s more about controlling a major on-ramp to TV than controlling the roads themselves.
Now Comcast will concentrate on running its still-giant broadband business, which is facing fierce competition from telcos selling their own internet connections. Elon Musk and Starlink are looming, too. Still, investors are much happier with a media-less Comcast and have rewarded the company with a stock boost of more than 20% following the split announcement.
Comcast argues that splitting the rest of its media business from its broadband business is good for both — each can control its own destiny and spending, and each will appeal to different sets of investors, etc. It said the same thing about splitting off Versant, too.
But it spent decades arguing otherwise.
One obvious question is how long Comcast’s to-be-spun media business remains a standalone business.
If Netflix was willing to pay $83 billion for HBO and the Warner Bros studios, what would it pay for Peacock and Universal? And before you answer, consider that Universal’s theme park business is strong and growing. And Netflix keeps making noises about building out its own experiential revenue, which you can help grow by visiting a Netflix House and buying tickets for the upcoming KPop Demon Hunters tour. Maybe the likes of Amazon and Apple would like a look, too.
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