Sky stars in challenging Comcast Q3
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Editor
| 25 October 2019

More traditional TV travails have been posted by an established US operators this time by Comcast whose third quarter of 2019 has indicated the challenges the company and its peers are facing right now.

For the quarter ended 30 September 2019, Comcast reported revenues of $5.541 billion, slipping 0.9% on an annual basis, with revenues at the three-quarter point of the year totalling $16.763 billion, inching back by 0.7% compared with Q3 2018. The slip in video revenue was said to have reflected a decrease in the number of residential video customers, partially offset by rate adjustments. Indeed the quarter saw 238,000 total video customer net losses – this compared with 379,000 total high-speed internet customer net additions in the quarter. Comcast now has 20.211 million video customers, down half a million compared with the same period a year ago.

Looking at subsidiary reporting lines, NBCUniversal revenue reported Q3 revenues of $8.295 billion, down 3.5% on a year-on-year basis. Revenue from the cable TV line dipped 2.8% annually to $2.771 billion while those for broadcast TV networks saw a 9.1% tumble to $2.23 billion. NBCUniversal EBITDA rose 1.6% on Q3 2018 to $2.091 billion.

For the nine months, NBCUniversal revenue decreased 5.9% to $24.8 billion compared with the previous year's results. The company noted that NBC Universal revenues in the same quarter of 2018 were boosted by which included an incremental $1.6 billion of revenue generated by the broadcasts of the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics and the NFL Super Bowl LII at its TV businesses.

Standout performance in the TV business for Comcast in the quarterly results was Sky whose content revenues in the quarter amounted to $315 million, up 9.4%. However, Sky’s direct-to-consumer revenue fell 3.2% annually to $3.793 billion.