Comcast Revenue Tops Estimates as Super Bowl, Olympics Lift Media Business | Investing News

By Helen Coster and Eva Mathews

(Reuters) -Comcast Corp’s initial-quarter revenue defeat Wall Avenue expectations on Thursday, as the media giant benefited from its broadcasts of the Tremendous Bowl and Beijing Olympics, as perfectly as a rebound in concept park attendance.

Overall profits rose 14% to $31.01 billion in the quarter, beating analysts’ ordinary estimate of $30.53 billion, in accordance to Refinitiv knowledge.

Comcast, the biggest U.S. cable operator, gained 262,000 broadband customers in the quarter, in comparison with Factset estimates of 229,000.

Broadband subscriber progress slumped 43.1% from a year ago, the third consecutive quarter of subscriber declines right after record growth through the pandemic. The organization has attributed the slowdown, in element, to much less people shifting households.

Profits at Comcast’s NBCUniversal media unit rose 36.3% to $6.87 billion, which include $1.48 billion in revenue from broadcasting the Tremendous Bowl and Beijing Olympics.

NBCU promotion product sales jumped 59.2%, benefiting from the sporting occasions as effectively as the growth of the Peacock streaming company.

Peacock included 4 million paid subscribers in the quarter, bringing total paid subscribers to 13 million. In a get in touch with with buyers Thursday, Main Govt Officer Brian Roberts reported the business does not anticipate seeing that kind of development just about every quarter.

NBCUniversal’s media division outcomes incorporated $472 million of income and an adjusted earnings prior to desire, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) reduction of $456 million similar to Peacock, “which includes amounts attributable to the 2022 Beijing Olympics and the NFL’s Tremendous Bowl,” compared to $91 million of income and an altered EBITDA loss of $277 million a calendar year before.

NBC’s Tremendous Bowl broadcast captivated an ordinary television viewers of about 101 million viewers, around 10% above the 2021 championship, in accordance to Nielsen information, with advertisement charges up 18% more than advertisement charges for the 2021 game.

Still the Winter Olympics in Beijing captivated the smallest prime-time audience given that NBCUniversal commenced broadcasting the video games, amid a period of time of transforming Television set-viewing behavior.

Web revenue attributable to Comcast rose to $3.55 billion, or 78 cents for each share, from $3.33 billion, or 71 cents for each share, a 12 months before.

Comcast shares had been trading down 3.37% at $42.95.

(Reporting by Helen Coster in New York and Eva Mathews in Bengaluru Enhancing by Arun Koyyur, Bernadette Baum and David Evans)

Copyright 2022 Thomson Reuters.