Comcast Cuts the Cord: Cable TV Customers Drop Below 50% of Company’s Connectivity Clients for First Time

thewrap.com:

just 48% of U.S. adults had a monthly cable or satellite subscription, while a slim majority had signed on for streaming services.Indeed, Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, also reported that its streaming service Peacock picked up 2 million net new subscribers in the quarter.As a result of the decline in cable subscribers, Comcast saw revenue from video fall 8% year-over-year to $7.38 billion in the first quarter, down from $8 billion last year.Put another way, cable TV revenue in the first quarter was not quite 25% of Comcast’s total revenue of $29.69 billion.At the same time, both broadband and wireless customers in the U.S.

gained steam, another data point that reflects the shift to streaming. Comcast’s residential broadband customers grew by 4% to 29.8 million, while business customers expanded by nearly 5% to 2.5 billion.

Wireless, a smaller part of the business, saw a leap of 83% to 5.7 million customers in the U.S.U.S. broadband revenue, meanwhile, jumped 5% to $6.34 billion, while wireless revenue leaped 27% to $858 million.Comcast pointed to residential connectivity as one of its growth drivers for the quarter.

Average revenue per user, a key metric of profitability, rose 4.5% during the quarter, the company said.CEO Brian Roberts, on the conference call to discuss the quarter’s result, said among the points he was “really proud of” during the quarter was a “significant margin expansion” in the connectivity business and the ARPU growth in U.S.